A legal battle over the results of an election to fill a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court continues, with the GOP challenger contesting thousands of ballots.
A federal judge on Monday sent the dispute over an election to fill a seat on North Carolina's Supreme Court back to the state's highest court. North Carolina's highest court on Tuesday then blocked the certification of the election results between Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs and GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin.
Griffin lost the general election, and two recounts later, one statewide machine recount and a partial hand-to-eye recount of ballots from randomly selected early voting sites and Election Day precincts in each county, still showed Riggs in the lead, according to WUNC. The results show the Democrat ahead by just 734 votes from over 5.5 million ballots cast, but Riggs is contending that 60,000 ballots cast should be invalidated. The ultimate winner gets an eight-year term on a Supreme Court where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans. Most of the ballots that Griffin is challenging came from voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — which a state law has required be sought in registration applications since 2004. Before the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002, voter registration forms did not clearly require that people list the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver's license number — Yet it's still legal to vote in cases where a person's last four Social Security numbers or driver's license digits cannot be validated. People can still present a HAVA document, such as a utility bill, and the state elections administration office is required to then assign that person a special identification number to register to vote, according to WUNC. Other large categories of votes that Griffin is challenging were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S
NORTH CAROLINA SUPREME COURT ELECTION DISPUTE REPUBLICANS DEMOCRATS
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