NC election attorneys: Griffin is undermining the court he wants to serve on | Opinion

We are appalled at what Jefferson Griffin is trying to do in the Supreme Court election. You should be as well.

We are election lawyers, almost completely retired. Between us we have represented Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, independents, write-ins, you name it. We have represented election boards, including the state board, and we have sued them. We think we have some idea what this is all about.

In full disclosure, we both have known Allison Riggs since she started practicing law, and we support her because she is smart as a whip, hardworking and fair. But this is not about her. This is about Jefferson Griffin’s abuse of the law and the courts.

Griffin lost the Supreme Court election. It was close, but he lost, proven by weeks of recounts. He still wants to overturn the results by throwing out the ballots of tens of thousands of legitimate voters.

The heart of Griffin’s case is a challenge to 60,000 voters whose election registration does not show a driver’s license or Social Security number. After DMV voter registration began several decades ago, the federal government started requiring voter registration records to include a driver’s license or SSN number. It turns out, though, that today there are many voters whose records don’t have those identifying numbers. It doesn’t mean they did not provide the identification, it doesn’t mean they weren’t qualified to vote, it probably only means that DMV license examiners or election workers did not ask for or did not record the information. Nothing suggests it is the voters’ fault or that any of them should not be voting.

The record problem was raised well before the election (by others, not by Griffin) and the State Board unanimously — both Republicans and Democrats — decided the record keeping needed to be fixed but that no voters had to be disqualified. After all, there was no reason to think the voters had done anything wrong or that any of them were not qualified to vote. Besides, everyone now has to show ID when they go to vote. The question also was addressed and answered the same way in federal court.

Griffin has raised a couple of other questions, affecting far fewer votes, but he did not question any voter’s registration before the election. He did not challenge even a single voter as being unqualified. Rather, he waited until after the election, until it was clear he had lost and suddenly decided the whole election should be thrown out. As if that strategy isn’t bad enough by itself, it gets worse in the way he is trying to bypass usual procedure.

In the normal course of things, an election protest is first decided by the State Board of Elections then may be appealed to superior court and from there to the state Court of Appeals and, maybe, to the state Supreme Court. Griffin went to the State Board, lost, and quickly decided he needed a short cut, immediately asking the N.C. Supreme Court to step in and save him.

If you keep up with judicial politics at all, you know that elections for the Supreme Court have become knock-down, drag-out partisan affairs recently. You also know that the last round of elections gave Republicans a clear 5-2 majority on the court. You may also know that some people have asked whether partisanship has tainted several recent decisions of the court overturning rulings by the previous Democrat-majority court.

See where this is headed? Jefferson Griffin has a bad case and seems to have calculated that his only way to victory is to get the Supreme Court to rule in his favor. And the only obvious reason for the court to do so is that Griffin is a Republican, like a majority of the justices.

Griffin certainly appears to be appealing to court partisanship. If successful, he will have severely harmed both the election process and the judicial system. Everything he has done so far demonstrates that he does not belong on the court.

This self-serving litigation can undermine confidence in the courts at the highest level. Every citizen should be wary of the potential damage.