On the heels of incumbent Allison Riggs’ apparent win in the North Carolina Supreme Court race, challenger Jefferson Griffin’s campaign has challenged about 60,000 ballots they say are plagued by “irregularities and discrepancies.” The campaign’s list of protests to county election boards covers several categories, listed below (with letters to the Durham County Board of Elections linked as examples):
- Deceased voters: Under North Carolina law, a registered voter “becomes disqualified [is no longer eligible to vote] through death, conviction of a felony, or removal out of the county.” If a person submits a ballot but dies before election day, that person is no longer an eligible voter, and the ballot should be removed. The Griffin campaign says that several counties failed to do so.
- Felon voters: In North Carolina, people cannot vote while they are serving their felon sentences, including probation and parole, something the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld last year. Despite that, some felons remain on the voter rolls and vote.
- Non-registered voters: North Carolina law states, “No person shall be permitted to vote who has not been registered.” The Griffin campaign claims that election officials counted ballots from people “whose application to register to vote was ultimately denied, or who were otherwise removed from the voter registration rolls.”
- No ID for overseas voters: The Griffin campaign contends that overseas voters (they did not mention military voters) are covered by North Carolina’s voter ID law and so much provide a copy of their ID with their ballot. As evidenced by an email from State Board of Elections (SBE) executive director Karen Brinson Bell the Griffin campaign included in the protest, election officials believe that they are not required to provide ID and have not required those voters to provide them.
- Overseas voting by nonresidents: The North Carolina Constitution (Article XI, Section 2(1)) limits voting rights for state elections to “any person who has resided in the State of North Carolina.” The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) “requires that the states and territories allow certain groups of citizens to register and vote absentee in elections for Federal offices” [emphasis added]. That includes the children of former North Carolina residents who themselves have never resided in the state. The Griffin campaign says that a state statute (163‑258.2.(e)) passed to comply with UOCAVA allowing those never-resident voters to vote in state elections violates the state constitution, and those registrations should not be allowed to vote in those races. At a minimum, election officials have not taken action to ensure that UOCAVA voters have met residency requirements. This issue is also covered by a Republican Party lawsuit that has so far failed to gain traction in the courts.
- Incomplete Voter Registration Information: North Carolina law (163‑82.4.(a)) requires election officials to request several things from people registering to vote, including their driver’s license or the last four digits of their social security number. The federal Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) imposed that ID number requirement on states. For a year, the SBE has been dealing with complaints related to its lack of enforcement of the HAVA provision for over 200,000 registrations. The Griffin campaign wants the SBE to contact those voters who lack the required ID numbers so they can provide them or, failing that, not count ballots from registrations lacking the numbers.
The first three protests covered empirical questions (such as “Is Tom Jones a felon or not?”) and are being dealt with by the respective county election boards. The latter three are primarily legal questions about classes of voters and are being handled by the SBE.
