A trailing North Carolina Supreme Court candidate asks the court to get involved in his race

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A trailing candidate in a very close election for the North Carolina Supreme Court asked that court on Wednesday to step in and prevent election officials from counting in his race over 60,000 ballots that he argues weren’t lawfully cast.

Jefferson Griffin, a Republican member of the Court of Appeals, filed the intervention request with the Supreme Court in his race with Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs. After recounts and protest hearings initiated by Griffin and other GOP candidates, Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes out of over 5.5 million ballots cast for the Nov. 5 election. The Associated Press has not yet called the race.

The State Board of Elections last week voted to dismiss the protests. Usually the next step for a dissatisfied trailing candidate seeking to prevent the board from issuing a certification of election to their rival is to appeal to Wake County Superior Court. Riggs has declared herself the winner and his campaign has said that Griffin should concede.

But Griffin went to the Supreme Court instead and asked the justices to rule by this coming Monday on his request to prevent a certificate from being issued to Riggs and to suspend the 10-day deadline to file an appeal in Wake County court.

Griffin’s attorneys said the delay will give the justices time to consider his arguments why three categories of ballots cast should not be counted in his race with Riggs. Five Republicans are on the seven-member Supreme Court, which has been a partisan flash point in the state over the past two years in court battles involving redistricting, photo voter identification and other voting rights.

The state Democratic Party sued earlier this month in federal court, seeking to prevent the board from throwing out the ballots, which it says would violate the U.S. Constitution and election laws. Democratic officials have said they fear the Supreme Court could ultimately side with Republicans and remove the challenged ballots, threatening a Riggs victory. Going straight to the Supreme Court with Wednesday’s filing would prevent additional delays if state Democrats sought to move the matter to federal court, Griffin’s brief said.

The challenges that Griffin advanced again Wednesday focus on three categories of ballots: those cast by people with voter registration records lacking driver’s licenses or containing partial Social Security numbers; overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were deemed North Carolina residents; and military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.

The state board, composed of three Democrats and two Republicans, threw out Griffin’s protests in a series of votes falling largely along party lines, with all but one by 3-2 counts. The board’s written order said in part there was no reasonable basis presented that showed an election law was violated or that irregularities occurred.

Griffin attorney Troy Shelton rejected arguments from Riggs that his client was trying to change election rules after the fact of an election. The registration record requirement took effect in 2004, for example, while residency requirements for voting in North Carolina go back to 1776.

“The Board was required to discount votes that were cast in violation of state law,” Shelton wrote Wednesday.

But board Chair Alan Hirsch said last week at the protest hearing that the idea of a registered voter having the vote that they cast discarded “is anathema to the democratic system and simply cannot be tolerated.”

The dismissed protests last week also originated from three Republican legislative candidates trailing in their respective General Assembly races. Appeals of scores of additional protests also filed by Griffin and the legislative candidates — but were first considered by county boards — are set to be heard Friday by the State Board of Elections. The AP has not called two of these races.

Once protests are exhausted for General Assembly candidates, their recourse is not to go to court but to formally ask the General Assembly chamber itself to decide who won the seat they are seeking.

In one of the seats, Republican state Rep. Frank Sossamon trails Democratic challenger Bryan Cohn by about 230 votes. A Cohn victory would mean Republicans fall one seat short of retaining their current veto-proof majority starting next month.

Gary D. Robertson, The Associated Press