Chris Seward/AP Photo
Ted Corcoran reads names from a list of over 60,000 people who cast ballots in the November 2024 election but whose votes have been challenged, January 14, 2025, in front of the North Carolina Supreme Court in Raleigh.
The Department of Justice has touched down in North Carolina—again. On Tuesday, in a bid to satisfy the Trump administration’s preoccupations with virtually nonexistent voter fraud, DOJ officials demanded that North Carolina comply with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), supposedly to ensure that all voter records are accurate.
The action comes weeks after the Republican candidate in the 2024 North Carolina state supreme court race lost by 734 votes. That candidate, Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state appeals court, had previously alleged in a lawsuit against his opponent Allison Riggs that the registration records of more than 60,000 voters—mysteriously concentrated among Democratic demographics—failed to include identifying numbers, either the last four digits of a voter Social Security number or a driver’s license number, and they should therefore be excluded from the final vote count, along with certain military and overseas voters and “never residents.”
There was just one catch: Listing one of those numbers on a voter registration application had been optional long before November. In effect, Griffin was attempting to change the election rules after the fact. A federal district court judge declined to throw out the votes of people who were compliant with state law when they registered to vote. Griffin eventually dropped his lawsuit earlier this month. “What Griffin was asking for was astonishing, totally unprecedented, and completely unlawful,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program.
The federal government’s complaint essentially picks up where Griffin v. Riggs left off, arguing that “a significant number of voter registration records in its statewide voter registration list” lack the correct identifying numbers, and gives the state 30 days to clean up voter rolls. The DOJ notes that the state board of elections’ general counsel admitted that the agency was aware of the issue and had been “working on this for quite a while.”
Given that these voters were compliant and that the state made the mistakes, the voters should not encounter future problems voting—should being the operative word. But a judge could make a different determination.
“If a court were to agree with the claims that DOJ has raised, 30 days is not sufficient for voters to receive notice and to remedy any of the purported defects that DOJ alleges,” says Sweren-Becker. Which would be a major upheaval in a state that’s seen more than its fair share of voting irregularities and racial discrimination.
State election machinery is essential to the North Carolina Republican Party’s political strategy—to win by rigging the rules rather than winning elections.
The jolts to North Carolina’s election system keep coming. Griffin was a slam dunk for Riggs, the winner, and there’s undoubtedly more to come from Washington. But another case, Stein v. Berger—an election administration lawsuit that will turn on a North Carolina governor’s unique constitutional powers—will have major implications for the balance of power in the state. North Carolinians often elect Democratic governors who serve as a check on a legislature jam-packed with Republicans, thanks to aggressive GOP gerrymandering.
In keeping with that pattern, the lawsuit was North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein’s (D) attempt to regain control of the state elections board. At the end of 2024, the state legislature passed a law transferring control of the elections board from the Democratic governor to the new state auditor, a Republican. (Until this year, the GOP had a supermajority in both legislative chambers. Today, Democrats have a one-seat majority in the House.) The governor, whose predecessors in office had controlled the elections board for the past 125 years, appealed the new law. In April, a lower court ruled that the legislature’s maneuver was unconstitutional. But under some bizarre circumstances, the state court of appeals allowed the changes to go forward.
The governor promptly requested a stay from the state supreme court to allow him to resume overseeing the board during the appeal. Late on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend, when public officials typically announce decisions they’d prefer that the fewest people notice, the state supreme court issued a decision in Stein v. Berger. In a 5-2 decision, it declined his request. “A sad stain on the judiciary,” wrote Riggs in her dissent.
The speed with which state auditor Dave Boliek moved to consolidate his new powers demonstrates how essential the state election machinery is to the North Carolina Republican Party’s political strategy—to win by rigging the rules rather than winning elections. Once installed, Boliek promptly ousted the elections board’s incumbents, three Democrats and two Republicans. He kept one Republican and added two state Republican Party nominees. The state Democratic Party nominated two new Democrats.
What Boliek appears to want is not an elections board as traditionally constituted but a larger, more powerful, and more ultraconservative board, complete with additional political staffers, lawyers, and funding to handle election challenges.
Riggs, of course, understands electoral dysfunction very well, after her challenger wanted to turn back time and not one, but two, recounts. The move against voters who were in compliance with state law raised fears of what the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the North Carolina civil rights leader, called “a post-election purge.” Griffin case’s quickly ran into trouble after the high court initially decided that manufacturing reasons to disallow ballots legally cast by overseas voters and certain stateside residents was not a good look.
“The outcome of that, however, should give North Carolina voters some confidence that the federal courts at a minimum are unwilling to overturn the results of an election by changing the rules after it happens,” says Sweren-Becker.
Yet the DOJ lawsuit brings the issues raised in Griffin v. Riggs back to the fore. To comply with HAVA, federal officials want the state to re-register these individuals within a 30-day window. The suit argues that the state has “declined” to take “sufficient steps” to contact voters to obtain the identifying numbers or issue a random identifying number and should not continue to rely on an “ad hoc” system of obtaining the information—when people appear at the polls, for example.
Writing at the Election Law Blog, Justin Levitt, a professor of law at LMU Loyola Law School, finds “one saving grace” in this messy issue: “It’s extremely likely that there are large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats likely to be affected by the state’s glitch.”
As for Stein v. Berger and the auditor’s new responsibilities, the majority of the state high court’s justices argued that all of the state’s top officials “share the same duty” and “corresponding degree of authority to execute the laws as the governor.” This conclusion alarmed Riggs, who saw no reason for another state official with tangential election oversight powers (over campaign finance compliance) to gather even more power over state elections at a time when the integrity of the vote is coming under deeper scrutiny.
In her dissent, Riggs viewed the state lawmakers’ decision as a “dramatic departure from how things are done and a significant disruption of the State Board of Elections operations and functioning.” Or as Riggs’s fellow justice, Anita Earls, put it in hers, “As a matter of common sense, no one calls their accountant to protect their right to vote.”
“The North Carolina legislature effectuated a power grab over the state board of elections last year and transferred powers over the state board from the governor to the state auditor, an office that generally has no oversight or expertise in elections whatsoever, with the very blatant intent to move control of the board to a partisan actor with whom the majority of the legislature agrees,” says Sweren-Becker.
How the move will affect the board is unknown, she adds, though “it’s clear what its intent was.” “This is a legislature that has a history of enacting policies to preserve partisan control over the state.”
