A lengthy legal battle in North Carolina could show how to flip an election

Supporters of Justice Allison Riggs rally to protest efforts by her opponent, Jefferson Griffin, to overturn the election results, in Raleigh, N.C., April 15, 2025. Even as Republicans suffer setbacks in their fight to overturn a loss in a State Supreme Court race, judges have shown a striking willingness to entertain the long-shot challenges. (Cornell Watson/The New York Times)

By Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina

For months, Republicans in North Carolina have tried to do what President Donald Trump and his allies could not in 2020: overturn an election that did not go their way.

What began as a sprawling effort to throw out 65,000 votes from the state’s Supreme Court election in November has shrunk to a legal skirmish over a small fraction of those ballots. But even as Republicans’ path to victory has narrowed, the final outcome still hangs in the balance.

And even if the Democratic candidate’s victory is not reversed, the battle may have sketched a blueprint for overturning future elections.

Never before, legal experts from both parties say, has a losing candidate gained so much legal traction in trying to nullify votes cast by people who followed every instruction given to them, both when they registered to vote and when they submitted their ballots. Federal and state judges have shown a willingness to entertain Republican challenges of votes in Democratic-leaning areas that focused on technicalities and sought to reinterpret voting laws long after Election Day.

A ‘rewriting of rules’

The six-month legal odyssey in North Carolina began shortly after the November election.

The Republican candidate, Judge Jefferson Griffin, lost by 734 votes to Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent. Two recounts confirmed the margin.

But Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections that called for ballots from roughly 65,000 voters to be rendered invalid. His argument had more than one part.

He asserted that about 60,000 of those people had been ineligible to vote because they had not supplied certain required personal data, such as a driver’s license number, when they registered to vote. But the omissions, he acknowledged, were not the voters’ fault. The blame lay with administrative errors.

The state Supreme Court rejected that argument, allowing the ballots to count.

Griffin also argued that several thousand absentee ballots that had been cast by military and overseas voters should be nullified because those people had not provided identification with their ballots.

This was a particularly remarkable move: North Carolina does has a voter ID requirement, but the State Board of Elections had exempted military and overseas voters from having to provide identification because of logistical and security hurdles. A Republican-controlled rules commission in the state Legislature had supported that exemption.

Nevertheless, the state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, ruled this month that these voters must provide identification within 30 days or their ballots will be thrown out. (Riggs has recused herself from the case.) After an appeal, a federal judge appointed by Trump ordered that the process continue. But last week, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked this ID-verification operation while it considered the case.

The complexities do not end there. At the same time, the State Board of Elections interpreted the state Supreme Court’s ruling regarding military and overseas voters as applying only to Guilford County, North Carolina, where there are about 1,400 contested votes. Griffin has appealed that interpretation, asking that five more counties be included in the ruling. If he wins that appeal, the number of votes in question will increase to about 8,600. All of those counties lean Democratic.

Lawyers for Griffin have said they are trying to enforce laws that were on the books before the election but that the board of elections failed to apply. The North Carolina Republican Party has been supportive of Griffin’s challenge.

“It’s unfortunate anyone has bought the lie from Democrats that this case is about anything other than the failure of the State Board of Elections to follow the law,” said Matt Mercer, the spokesperson for the state Republican Party.

An uncertain future

Griffin’s effort in North Carolina is a culmination, of sorts, of a growing movement among right-wing groups to challenge voter eligibility en masse.

Spurred on by the conspiracy theories of election fraud that proliferated after the 2020 election, which were in turn driven by Trump’s lie that the contest had been stolen from him, these groups have embarked on their own investigations of voter eligibility. They have filed mass challenges and flooded local election officials with complaints that often target minority and poor communities, groups that have traditionally leaned Democratic.

Legal experts said some of the lawsuits in 2020, including those that tried to toss out ballots placed in drop boxes, had served as something of a trial balloon for Griffin.

Danielle Lang, the director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said those cases “were thrown out everywhere because it was beyond the pale to suggest that a voter who dropped their ballot in a drop box set up by election officials” could have that vote invalidated after an election.

But should the courts ultimately side with Griffin, Lang warned, “you will be able to engineer election results.” Or at least try to with much greater ease.