North Carolina Supreme Court Rules Most Votes in Contested Election Can Be Counted

The race is for a seat on the state’s top court.

Absentee ballots in Raleigh, N.C., in an undated file photo. Allison Joyce/Getty Images

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered the counting of tens of thousands of votes in a contested election for a judicial seat.

In a 4–2 ruling handed down on April 11, the state’s highest court said election officials must count votes from people who have been registered since 2004 but have no driver’s license numbers or last four digits of their Social Security numbers on record.

The majority said that a lower court wrongly decided earlier in April that the votes could not be tallied unless the voters provided proof of eligibility before a deadline. It was the North Carolina State Board of Elections that was at fault for not making sure the voters had presented the numbers, according to the state Supreme Court’s order.

“The Board’s inattention and failure to dutifully conform its conduct to the law’s requirements is deeply troubling. Nevertheless, our precedent on this issue is clear,” the April 11 order reads.

“Because the responsibility for the technical defects in the voters’ registrations rests with the Board and not the voters, the wholesale voiding of ballots cast by individuals who subsequently proved their identity to the Board by complying with the voter identification law would undermine the principle that ’this is a government of the people, in which the will of the people—the majority—legally expressed, must govern.'”

The situation would be different if there was evidence showing “that a significant number of the roughly 60,000 ballots in the first category were cast by individuals whose identity was not verified by voter identification or who were not otherwise qualified to vote,” according to the order.

The decision concerns a 2024 election for a seat on the state’s top court. At last count, Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, led challenger Jefferson Griffin, an appeals court judge, by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast.

Riggs did not participate in the new ruling, which largely left intact two other portions of the appellate court’s ruling.

The justices declined to reverse a finding that military and overseas voters who did not provide photographic identification, or fill out identification exception forms, must provide one or the other for their ballots to count.

The appeals court had given these voters 15 business days to cure the issue. But the state Supreme Court said the voters have 30 calendar days.

The majority also did not alter the finding that voters who have never lived in the United States are ineligible to vote, meaning that the ballots they cast will be removed from the vote totals.

Riggs said in a statement to news outlets, “It is unacceptable that the Court is choosing to selectively disenfranchise North Carolinians serving our country, here and overseas.”

The ruling “is consistent with what we asked in our initial filing,” a spokesperson for Griffin told news outlets in a statement.

Justice Anita Earls, who concurred in part and dissented in part, said that the order in its treatment of overseas voters “compels unequal treatment of North Carolina voters and infringes on their state constitutional right to vote.”

Justice Richard Dietz, also concurring in part and dissenting in part, criticized the decision to issue a ruling without hearing oral arguments.

“These are questions that should be resolved in a declaratory judgment action seeking prospective relief that would apply in future elections,” he wrote.