After officially losing the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court race by 736 votes, Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin challenged over 60,000 ballots.
Those challenges included three legal claims: that tens of thousands of ballots did not have the legally required identifying numbers, that over a thousand overseas ballots were not accompanied by legally required voter IDs, and that hundreds of votes in the race were illegally cast by people who had never resided in the state.
Those challenges lasted for six months, first as protests to the State Board of Elections and then as a lawsuit seeking to have the ballots rejected.
During that time, Griffin’s reputation suffered.
The public pronouncements by the political left and the media were damning, if expected. One newspaper called Griffin a “sore loser,” supposedly so beguiled by the prospect of power that he was willing to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters to gain a seat on the state Supreme Court. Another said that corruption and attempting to steal elections would “always be Griffin’s legacy.”
One progressive news outlet went as far as to declare that Griffin, who serves in the Army National Guard, should resign his commission, further stating that “seldom before has one man so thoroughly ruined his reputation in the pursuit of power.”
But Griffin also faced opposition, if quieter, from the right. Several conservative leaders I spoke with in late 2024 and early 2025 believed that Griffin’s lawsuit had hurt his reputation and future political prospects.
To be sure, I also opposed Griffin’s lawsuit, agreeing with North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Richard Dietz, who wrote that it amounted to “post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process.”
By the time Griffin dropped his lawsuit and conceded to Riggs in early May, it appeared that he may have permanently damaged his political future beyond repair.
But then a funny thing happened. All three of Griffin’s challenges were proven correct in court on their substance, if not timing. The board has since agreed to correct all three legal issues raised in his complaint.
First, the board’s three Republicans and two Democrats voted unanimously on June 24 to approve a plan to obtain driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers (required by state law and the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA) of voters for registrations that lack them. Registrations with missing “HAVA numbers” were by far the biggest portion of ballots in Griffin’s complaint.
Then, on July 21, the board unanimously agreed to fix the other two problems raised in Griffin’s complaint. First, they agreed that military and overseas voters must comply with North Carolina’s ID requirement. Second, individuals who have never legally resided in North Carolina (the so-called “never residents”) can vote only in federal elections in the state.
All three of those changes in board policies came to pass due to Griffin’s lawsuit and a subsequent ruling establishing that all were illegal, even if Griffin’s requested relief was not enforceable for the 2024 election. As I wrote after US Chief District Judge Richard E. Myers II ordered the board to certify incumbent North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs’ election victory, “Jefferson Griffin’s challenge of his election loss has resulted in victories that will make North Carolina’s elections more secure, but he will not enjoy the fruits of those victories.”
Indeed, he has not.
Nevertheless, being proven right on every legal issue he raised in his lawsuit may help remove the tarnish his reputation suffered through his persistence in pursuing it. North Carolina elections will be better in the future, and we have Jefferson Griffin to thank for that.
Republicans do not need a Griffin comeback to win judicial elections. Since North Carolina restored partisan judicial races in 2018, they have won 19 of the 26 statewide judicial races and currently hold 12 of 15 seats on the state Court of Appeals. Their bench of qualified potential state Supreme Court candidates is deep.
Even so, Griffin is better positioned for a Supreme Court run or reelection to the State Court of Appeals than he was a few months ago.
