Demonstrators in downtown Raleigh declare Allison Riggs rightfully won the state Supreme Court race against Jefferson Griffin. (Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude and importance of the injustice that four members of the North Carolina Supreme Court – Chief Justice Paul Newby and Associate Justices Curtis “Trey” Allen, Tamara Barringer, and Phil Berger, Jr. – are attempting to perpetrate against the people of North Carolina and the rule of law.
Veteran constitutional law scholar Prof. Gene Nichol rightfully put it this way in describing the foul foursome’s decision last Friday to overturn the expressed will of voters and, in effect, steal a Supreme Court election: “On Friday, April 11, 2025, a day in judicial infamy, the North Carolina Supreme Court crossed the Rubicon.” He called on all four to resign.
The object of Prof. Nichol’s thoroughly justified ire, of course, was the group’s outrageous ruling that a large number of ballots legally cast in the November 2024 state Supreme Court election between incumbent Justice Allison Riggs and challenger Jefferson Griffin can be retroactively thrown out because they – the justices – disagree with previous unanimous and bipartisan rulings on managing those ballots rendered long prior to the election by the State Board of Elections.
Think about that for a moment — it’s a stunning concept.
Thousands of voters who cast ballots according to longstanding and duly adopted rules — rules not even controversial enough to have received a single dissenting vote on an election board that’s frequently divided on partisan lines – can now be disenfranchised months after the election in such a way that it will quite possibly overturn the result.
The absurdity of the decision was even too much for conservative Republican Justice Richard Dietz. As he wrote in a passionate and on-the mark dissenting opinion:
“By every measure, this is the most impactful election-related court decision our state has seen in decades. It cries out for our full review and for a decisive rejection of this sort of post hoc judicial tampering in election results.”
Dietz went on to say that even if the federal courts ultimately set the matter right, his four colleagues have opened a dangerous Pandora’s Box:
“Even if the federal courts ultimately reverse the Court of Appeals decision…the door is open for losing candidates to try this sort of post-election meddling in state court in the future. We should not allow that.”
Dietz’s critique of changing election rules after the ballots are in goes to the heart of what’s so grievously wrong with the majority’s decision, but for those trying to better understand what’s really going on here, a look at the practicalities of overseas voting and the rules the election board adopted is also helpful. The issue here is whether those voters should have been required to provide a copy of their photo ID with their ballots.
As NC Newsline’s Lynn Bonner reported in early February, there were big and utterly reasonable legal and practical reasons why the board opted not to impose such a requirement.
First and foremost was the likely conflict posed by a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. The election board was rightfully concerned that if it tried to require photo ID of military and overseas voters, it would run afoul of both that (and the common practice in other states).
And then there were the simple practicalities of how such a requirement might have even been implemented. In her report, Bonner spoke with overseas voter Aidan Hunt, who told her that he used the official electronic portal to vote and didn’t believe it even featured a way to send a copy of an ID.
“As best as I can recall, there’s no function to upload random stuff going through that portal. There wasn’t any place designated for an ID,” he said. “It’s not like an email message where you can just put whatever in there.”
All of these factors are more than sufficient to illustrate the folly of the Newby-Allen-Barringer-Berger ruling, but just to add another extra measure of mind-blowing absurdity, consider this: the ruling apparently only applies to some military and overseas ballots that the GOP candidate challenged.
As Justice Anita Earls wrote in her dissenting opinion:
“What is worse, these targeted voters are only those who happened to have registered in Guilford County, or maybe one of three or four other counties that vote heavily Democratic, the special order is not clear, but in any case, not every such voter in the state.”
You got that? North Carolina is preparing to throw out a bundle of ballots cast by lawful voters, but only in areas more likely to vote Democratic. Riggs, for example, won Guilford County by a margin of more than 25%.
As the saying goes, you really can’t make this stuff up.
Justice Riggs has, of course, appealed to the federal courts, and if there’s any justice left in this creaky old republic, the Newby-Allen-Barringer-Berger abomination will not stand. But even in the best-case scenario, the damage to the legitimacy of our judiciary and the democracy it’s supposed to safeguard will be immense and long-lasting.
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