NC Supreme Court says most votes will stay

We are seeing some very interesting state Supreme Court battles this election cycle, but none has been more dramatic than the battle in North Carolina.

We had an election that was decided by less than 1,000 votes, an appeal, and a shocking court order against the majority candidate.

The Election

Currently, Republicans have the majority on the court, and incumbent Justice Allison Riggs (D) and Jefferson Griffin (R) were running for the seat.

Riggs ended up taking the seat by 734 votes, an absurdly close election by any measure.

Riggs has been a huge supporter of newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that she was using her rulings to influence her work on the bench.

Griffin had leaned into his experience, stating, "I’ve been able to show the people of North Carolina that I’m a constitutional conservative, that I believe in the rule of law."

Recount

When the election was over, not surprisingly, Riggs challenged the outcome, saying that roughly 65,000 ballots were in question for their validity.

When experts examined the source of the ballots being questioned, the general consensus was that if the ballots were disqualified, this election would likely be flipped in favor of Riggs.

Many of the ballots being challenged were absentee ballots, and while the case went back and forth in the lower courts, the state Supreme Court was going to have the final say.

When that ruling came down, most people were shocked, but it once again proved that these higher courts are very hesitant to discount votes.

They Can Stay

The state’s high court ruled 4-2 that the majority of the votes are going to remain in play in this election.

The ruling stated, “Under this Court’s longstanding precedent, mistakes made by negligent election officials in registering citizens who are otherwise eligible to vote will not deprive the citizens of their right to vote or render their vote void after they have been cast.”

All hope is not lost, however, as the court did leave the door open for the remaining ballots to be tossed if the voters do not verify their IDs before the deadline, which still did not sit well with everyone, including GOP Judge Richard Dietz, who stated, “I expected that, when the time came, our state courts surely would embrace the universally accepted principle that courts cannot change election outcomes by retroactively rewriting the law. I was wrong. The Court of Appeals has since issued an opinion that gets key state law issues wrong, may implicate a host of federal law issues, and invites all the mischief I imagined in the early days of this case.”

What I fail to comprehend in all of this is that while I believe everyone has the right to vote, the ballots also need to be legal, and if they are not, then they should be tossed. There are rules in place for a reason, but our courts continue to look the other way, which is why I think we need to find better ways to cast these votes so the ID and validity of the ballot cannot be in question. Until we do that, we will continue to have these problems and challenges.