Initial recount affirms Riggs' lead in NC Supreme Court race. Griffin ramps up efforts to toss ballots

A recount of the closely contested race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court ended Tuesday, reaffirming the original result: Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat incumbent, beating Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by several hundred votes.

Griffin isn't conceding defeat yet, however. He requested a second type of recount to be done, which state officials confirmed will begin this week.

Riggs was ahead by 625 votes when Griffin requested the first recount — a small sliver of the more than 5.5 million ballots cast in the race. But some counties had yet to finish counting votes at that time; by the time they finished their initial count Riggs' lead had grown to 734 votes. The recount, which was handled by all 100 counties individually, resulted in each candidate losing exactly 110 votes statewide. The end result was no change: Riggs still ahead by 734 votes.

"The recount confirms how well our elections are run in this state," Riggs' campaign manager, Embry Owen, said in a news release. "Judge Jefferson Griffin needs to immediately concede. Losing candidates must respect the will of voters and not needlessly waste state resources."

Griffin plans to keep fighting, however and not only by calling for a second recount. His main strategy to win the race is a separate challenge — which Griffin's campaign and state Republican Party officials began mounting soon after the election ended — to have election officials agree to throw out more than 60,000 people's ballots.

Many of those challenges are based on a legal theory that claims elections officials don't have enough information to confirm some voters' identities. Republicans tried making the same claim prior to election and failed. Their arguments were rejected by the State Board of Elections and by federal courts. But GOP officials continue to press their efforts post-election, and on Tuesday the NCGOP filed a legal motion asking for the process of considering those complaints to be sped up.

In other cases, they claim some felons were able to slip through the cracks and illegally vote, or that there were other discrepancies.

"The people of North Carolina deserve to see these protests resolved in a timely manner," Republican Party spokesman Matt Mercer said. "Any delays at the N.C. State Board of Elections would undermine voter confidence and transparency."

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper spoke with reporters Tuesday and criticized the Republican Party's attempts to throw out tens of thousands of people's ballots.

"It looks like they're flinging a lot against the wall and hoping something sticks," Cooper said. "But in the middle of it, they're challenging people who are citizens of North Carolina, who have every right to vote. They are just, seemingly indiscriminately, filing these challenges."

The court currently has a 5-2 Republican majority. Three Republican-held seats are up for election in 2028, so if Riggs win this year's election, Democrats could have a chance to flip control of the court in 2028.

In recent years outside groups have spent tens of millions of dollars seeking to influence the political control of the court, which has a large amount of power to settle political disputes in addition to lawsuits on business matters, criminal appeals and other legal cases.

Some protests already dismissed

The Wake County Board of Elections took up several dozen of Griffin's protests to local voters' ballots on Monday. The board voted that Griffin's campaign might be right about one ballot having been improperly counted. They voted to dismiss the rest of the complaints.

In multiple cases where they dismissed the claims, the Wake County officials found, Griffin's challenges were based on cases of mistaken identity that led to his allies wrongfully accusing people of committing voter fraud.

Political campaigns in North Carolina have more leeway to aggressively launch allegations of voter fraud, even if all or many of those claims end up being false, due to a new court ruling earlier this year from the state Supreme Court.

That ruling stemmed from a defamation case following the 2016 elections, when the campaign of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory falsely accused people of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the election results that led to Democrat Roy Cooper unseating McCrory.

The GOP operatives in that case admitted to falsely accusing people of committing voter fraud but argued they should be immune from defamation lawsuits regardless.

The voters who sued them won at trial and at the North Carolina Court of Appeals, but the Supreme Court reversed those rulings earlier this year in a ruling that had ramifications for this year and future elections, too.

The court's Republican justices wrote in the opinion that while individuals do risk damage to their reputations if falsely accused of committing voter fraud, it's more important not to scare people away from reporting cases of suspected voter fraud in case those allegations turn out to be real.

"We want people to come forward if they have information about unlawful voting practices,” Republican Justice Trey Allen said during the oral arguments in that case.

Neither Riggs nor the court's other Democratic justice, Anita Earls, participated in those arguments or in writing the opinion. Both had been part of the legal team representing the falsely accused voters before later joining the Supreme Court, and they recused themselves from hearing the case.