Copying the reporting of Lynn Bonner for the NC Newsline:
Jefferson Griffin and Allison Riggs |
A few hours after Myers issued the order, the state Board of Elections and incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs filed notice of appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes, but Griffin has filed a series of voter protests. Griffin wants the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-2 majority, to throw out more than 60,000 votes on the belief that erasing them will allow him to defeat Riggs.
Democrats want to win back the Supreme Court majority by the next round of redistricting in 2031, and holding Riggs’ seat is an important first step in achieving that goal.
After the state Board of Elections rejected his protests last month, Griffin asked the state Supreme Court to step in to stop the board from certifying the election results and toss out the votes he’s contesting.
The Board of Elections had Griffin’s petition transferred to federal court, but Myers wrote in an order Monday that none of Griffin’s challenges “necessarily raise an issue of federal law.”
Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years.
The Republican Party used the same argument last year in a lawsuit seeking to have more than 225,000 voters purged from the registration rolls or to be forced to cast provisional ballots. Myers partially dismissed that suit.
The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.
A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names.
Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls. Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said.
“No one has come forward with information about any single person on these lists not providing all the information that’s requested of them,” Tindall said.“Data errors, typos, name changes” overlay all of it, she said.
Myers said in his order he considered the League of Women Voters’ brief.