November 19, 2024 UPDATE
While we will have a statewide recount, it appears that incumbent North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs has achieved the unlikely, pulling ahead of Griffin ten days after election day. As of this morning, according to data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE), she leads Griffin by 625 votes.
So, what happened?
First, absentee, military, and overseas ballots broke more heavily for Riggs this year than they did in 2020 for Democrat Cheri Beasley in an even closer Supreme Court race in 2020.
One problem is that some election officials added unnecessary drama to the situation with how they handled absentee returns. Several counties, most prominently Wake, waited until the last moment to report the results from their absentee ballots received on or after (in the case of some military and overseas ballots) election day. In addition, New Hanover County violated current law by not counting all the absentee ballots they received before election day on election day.
The General Assembly can address that problem by requiring all counties to count all absentee ballots received on election day and make a final determination on those that require cures by the Friday three days after election day. That would remove some uncertainty from the process. Also, county officials who break election law should lose their jobs.
The late-breaking absentee votes for Riggs were not enough to put her on top, however. What helped her on the county canvass was a new class of provisional ballots: those associated with people who did not have voter ID and submitted a reasonable impediment form.
According to data from the SBE’s “provisional_20241105.txt” file (located here, not yet final), there are a total of 4,385 such provisional ballots this year. Of those, 3,451 were accepted, a number that will grow slightly as the last approvals are added to the data. Another 108 were partially accepted, meaning that the voter cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, and only those races the voter could legally vote in (including all statewide races, such as for Supreme Court) were counted on that ballot. 616 of those provisional ballots were not accepted. Considering how squishy the SBE made regulations around the reasonable impediment provision, I am amazed that they unanimously found problems with 616. All the provisional ballots in this category (including those not counted) would have been reported on election day prior to the implementation of voter ID.
Of those accepted and partially accepted ballots, 1,643 were from Democrats (most of who presumably voted for Riggs), while 878 were from Republicans. That is a net gain of 765 Democratic votes. This morning, Riggs leads by 625 votes.
ORIGINAL POST
When Gov. Roy Cooper announced in 2023 that he was appointing Allison Riggs to the North Carolina Supreme Court to fill the remaining term of retiring justice Michael Morgan, I predicted that she would likely have a short and unhappy tenure on the court, unhappy because she was in the minority and short because she would have to defend that seat just one year later.
After the November 5 election, it appears that the prediction will come true, but just not yet. As of this morning (November 8), Riggs trails Jefferson Griffin by a little over 8,000 votes.
As seen in the table below, Griffin’s win was part of a sweep of statewide judicial races that also included three Court of Appeals contests. Republicans enjoyed similar sweeps in 2022 and 2020, although Democrats won every statewide judicial race in 2018.
Table: North Carolina 2024 statewide judicial race results as of November 7. Source: North Carolina State Board of Elections
Riggs is not ready to concede, however. She may hold out through the county canvasses on November 15 and an all-but-inevitable recount after that.
The good news is that we have an analog: a 2020 chief justice race that was even closer. Challenger Paul Newby led the incumbent, Cheri Beasley (another Cooper appointee), by over 3,000 votes on election night, only to see that lead shrink to 416 votes after all absentee-by-mail and provisional ballots were counted and county boards of elections dealt with protests from the candidates. A statewide recount brought Newby’s final official margin of victory to 401.
Riggs is unlikely to be any more successful than Beasley in reversing the election night result. The first and most obvious reason is that Riggs’ vote deficit is more than twice as big as Beasley’s.
Also, when looking at the batches of ballots not counted on election night, none offer a clear path to the large gains Riggs needs. The State Board of Elections (SBE) noted four such batches of ballots, which account for less than two percent of all votes:
- Absentee ballots received on Election Day: 37,406 absentee, military, and overseas ballots were accepted on election day and nine days after in 2020. This year, only absentee ballots accepted on election day remain to be counted. There are also far fewer absentee ballots cast this year compared to 2020. Also, Riggs’ margin among absentee voters so far is 56.8-43.2 percent. That is hardly the margin she needs with the remaining absentee ballots. As of this writing, the gap between Griffin and Riggs has closed by about 2,000 votes compared to election night, likely due to most counties counting the absentee ballots.
- Military and overseas-citizen ballots: Again, that is a relatively small batch of ballots that are unlikely to produce much of a margin for Riggs.
- Absentee ballots dropped off by voters from the 25 counties affected by Hurricane Helene at election offices or early voting sites outside of the voters’ home counties: While the size of this batch of ballots is unknown, most of the area is Republican-leaning, and it is reasonable to believe that Griffin will gain more votes once they are counted.
- Provisional ballots: This is theoretically Riggs’ best hope of a large change in the vote total. The SBE has reported that county boards will sort through 60,307 provisional ballots before the November 15 county canvass. There are two problems for Riggs, however. The first is that it is likely that fewer than half of those ballots will be found to have been legally voted and counted. The second is that they are as likely to break towards Griffin as they are towards Riggs. Newby won the provisional ballot vote in 2020, 8,014 to 7,025. In 2022, provisional votes in both Supreme Court races broke towards Democrats, but by less than 100 votes each: 5,804 to 5,719 and 5,822 to 5,723.
Again, there are just not enough votes there for Riggs to overcome the current 8,000 vote margin
The race is close enough that Riggs could call for a recount. Beasley did the same thing in 2020, and the result was a change of 15 votes in favor of Beasley.
So, while Riggs is within her rights as a candidate to keep contesting the election, it is virtually impossible that she will succeed. It is perhaps ironic that her short and unhappy tenure on the North Carolina Supreme Court will be capped by a futile attempt to keep the job.
