More legal briefs sought in unresolved North Carolina Supreme Court election

RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal appeals court on Friday said it would hear more arguments involving an extremely close election in November for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat where the trailing candidate has argued that tens of thousands of ballots cast should not have been counted.

After reviewing several legal filings this week, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, scheduled oral arguments for Jan. 27 as well as briefing deadlines. The order means that both the federal appeals court and the state Supreme Court likely will consider simultaneously substantial matters related to the race between Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs and Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin.

Election results show Riggs ahead of Griffin by 734 votes from over 5.5 million ballots cast. But attorneys for Griffin — a state Court of Appeals judge — argued in formal election protests that well over 60,000 ballots came from ineligible voters.

Most of those being challenged were cast by voters whose registration records lacked either a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. A state law has required that such numbers be sought in registration applications since 2004.

The State Board of Elections dismissed Griffin's protests last month and had been poised to certify Riggs as the winner on Friday. Griffin had already gone to the state Supreme Court asking it to intervene, but the board removed that matter to federal court, saying it involved many federal election and voting laws. Griffin wanted the matter to remain before the state Supreme Court, which has a Republican majority of justices.

But on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Myers ruled that North Carolina state courts were the proper venue to hear Griffin's arguments and returned Griffin's appeals to the state Supreme Court. The next day, the Supreme Court's justices in a 4-2 decision agreed to block the election certification. Riggs recused herself from the deliberations. The justices asked for briefs to be filed in a schedule that ran through Jan. 24.

Meanwhile, the state elections board asked the 4th Circuit this week to decide whether Myers should have retained jurisdiction of Griffin's case and ultimately reject Griffin's demand for a preliminary injunction.

It's unclear how separate rulings in the federal and state appeals in this election will shake out. Griffin's claims largely focus on state laws and the state constitution. Attorney for Riggs and the election board have argued that federal laws and the U.S. Constitution play a large role in the case, however.

Other categories of votes that Griffin is challenging were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were deemed North Carolina residents; and by military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.

Earlier Friday, a state trial judge denied a request by Republican Party groups and two voters to order ballots cast by voters whose registration records lack driver's license or Social Security numbers and found not to be valid voters to be removed from final election counts for state elections in November.

The state board has said there are many reasons why a voter record lacks such a number. A lawyer representing the board Friday in Wake County court said that evidence has been presented showing the voters at issue were ineligible to cast ballots.