The courts must stop this judge from stealing an election

Editor's note: This editorial first appeared in the New York Times, February 5, 2025)

As President Trump started his second term by pardoning violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Republicans in North Carolina already had a monthslong effort underway to achieve, essentially, the same goal the insurrectionists had four years ago: to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

On Nov. 5, North Carolina voters re-elected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to her seat on the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court. The contest was close, but clear.

The result of this race was in line with the results of several other statewide elections in North Carolina where voters rejected far-right extremism, including in the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction. North Carolinians also elected enough Democrats to break a heavily gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the state legislature.

Yet when Justice Riggs defeated her Republican opponent — Judge Jefferson Griffin — he refused to accept the choice of North Carolina’s electorate. Despite two recounts and the North Carolina State Board of Elections confirming Justice Riggs’s victory, Judge Griffin sued, insisting that the State Supreme Court block the certification of Justice Riggs’s re-election and invalidate more than 60,000 valid ballots, a move clearly aimed at installing him as the victor. More specifically, in his challenge, Judge Griffin alleges that in the state’s registration database, records for most of the challenged voters lack a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. He also challenged the validity of a smaller number of votes cast by overseas citizens and military service members from several heavily Democratic counties.

But there is no suggestion that any of these 60,000-plus voters acted improperly, deliberately cast illegal ballots or failed to produce required identification when voting. And when the State Board of Elections reviewed his claim, it concluded, in a meticulous written decision, that Judge Griffin’s allegations lacked substance. The issue that is now before the courts is whether a court can simply cast aside tens of thousands of appropriately cast ballots after an election is over. This shouldn’t be a question: The United States Constitution and other federal laws protect against such ballots from being retroactively discarded.

Ordinarily, a request like this one would be a nonstarter. That a sitting judge filed this lawsuit in the first place is, frankly, disturbing. As an officer of the court who has sworn an oath, Judge Griffin has an obligation to protect the electoral process, not undermine it with a shameless attempt to disenfranchise voters. What’s even more distressing, though, is that the North Carolina Supreme Court’s Republican majority has allowed such a lawsuit to proceed and, in doing so, has stopped the certification of the election results.

This action is a departure from the way courts on the whole acted in 2020. That year, federal and state judges across the country — including those affiliated with the Republican Party, all the way up to the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court — refused Mr. Trump’s demands to throw out legal ballots. They refuted baseless claims that the presidential race was stolen. None of the courts ultimately stopped any states from certifying election results by their required deadlines — not one.

What’s happening in North Carolina, by contrast, should concern all Americans. Any judge operating in an independent and fair manner would maximize the chance that all of North Carolinians’ ballots are counted and ensure that the electoral result reflects the decision of the state’s citizens. But so far, the North Carolina Supreme Court has done the opposite, opening the door to mass disqualifications of legitimate voters — after the fact — to try to install a losing candidate from the court majority’s political party.

As a nation, we have seen up close the lengths to which too many in the Republican Party are willing to go to circumvent our democratic process to illegitimately attain and hold on to power. We’ve seen states impose voting requirements designed to shrink the electorate. We’ve seen partisan and racial gerrymanders entrench extreme politicians in custom-made districts.

Eric Holder is a former Attorney General of the United States.