By Sam Walker SamWalkerOBXNews
A rally will be held at 4 p.m. Monday at Dowdy Park in Nags Head to protest the still-disputed race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court that has brought into question the registration of over 60,000 voters in the state.
Dowdy Park is at the corner of U.S. 158 and Bonnett Street.
The disputed votes includes 169 voters in Dare County, 109 in Currituck County, and 13 in Hyde County, including five on Ocracoke Island, who cast ballots in the November 2024 general election, and includes nearly all political parties as well as unaffiliated voters.
“Multiple recounts and thorough election audits have confirmed that Justice Allison Riggs received the most votes to retain her seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Despite this, losing candidate Jefferson Griffin refuses to concede and, instead, is demanding that the courts do the unthinkable—invalidate the ballots of 60,000 North Carolinians,” the press release says. “Notably, young people and Black voters have been disproportionately targeted by Griffin’s challenges, as he makes a baseless and extreme attempt to overturn the results of the election.
The rally on Monday “aims to publicly call on the NC Supreme Court to reject Griffin’s efforts to disenfranchise 60,000 voters and uphold the election’s integrity,” the press release said. “The names of the 169 disenfranchised Dare County voters will be read.”
Multiple recounts have found Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, finished with 734 more votes than Republican state Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin.
Griffin exhausted efforts with the state Board of Elections and has since turned to the courts in an effort to have three sets of ballots invalidated.
NC Newsline reports that Griffin claims ballots were cast by people who are not legally registered because they did not include partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers on their registration applications.
In the last few months, voters Griffin is challenging have come forward to declare they did include the information, but it was not attached to electronic voter rolls due to data mismatches or typos.
Griffin is also challenging about 5,500 military and overseas absentee voters because they did not include photo ID with their ballots. The state Board of Elections does not require these voters to submit photo ID.
Additionally, he is challenging a few hundred voters who have never lived in North Carolina but are connected to the state through their parents.
Among those on the list of 60,273 voters being challenged is one of the Army crew members that died when a Black Hawk helicopter collided with a commercial airliner in Washington, D.C., last month.
The theory behind the challenges has been called into question even by an election denier that said Griffin’s challenge amounted to “voter suppression,” ProPublica reports.
The case has bounced between federal and state courts, and earlier this week, a Wake County judge ruled against Griffin’s claims.
He has since filed an appeal with the same court he serves on, but said Tuesday he will not participate in the case.
It is expected the Republican-dominated appeals panel will rule in Griffin’s favor, and the case would then move to the state Supreme Court.
On Thursday, Riggs and the state Board of Elections filed a request for the case to bypass the appellate court and move directly to the state’s high court.
In an order last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals left the door open to having the case considered in federal court at the conclusion of state court proceedings if questions of federal law remain.
There are several search tools that have been set up on the web with all 60K+ names, but the following is the easiest to navigate by county: https://thegriffinlist.com