Republican Jefferson Griffin conceded the North Carolina Supreme Court race on Wednesday to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs, bringing an end to the last unresolved contest from the 2024 election that dragged on for months after a barrage of lawsuits.
The announcement came two days after a federal judge ruled against Griffin’s legal challenge to tens of thousands of ballots and ordered North Carolina’s election board to certify Riggs’ 734-vote victory.
The from U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, effectively put an end to all ongoing litigation and provided Griffin with seven days to appeal. Instead, Griffin, chose to end his legal efforts six months after the final votes had been cast in last November’s election.
“While I do not fully agree with the District Court’s analysis, I respect the court’s holding — just as I have respected every judicial tribunal that has heard this case,” Griffin said in a statement Wednesday morning. “I will not appeal the court’s decision.”
Riggs said in a statement: “After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes, thousands of volunteers mobilized, hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day.”
Riggs, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023, emerged after Election Day last November narrowly ahead of Griffin, a state appeals court judge.
A full machine recount and a partial hand recount both showed Riggs leading Griffin by 734 votes out of 5.5 million ballots cast.
But Griffin quickly filed hundreds of legal challenges, backed by the North Carolina Republican Party, in all of the state’s 100 counties, alleging that more than 65,000 people had voted illegally.
Those claims focused on three categories of voters: voters who Griffin’s lawyers claimed didn’t have driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file in their registration records; overseas voters who haven’t lived in North Carolina; and overseas voters who failed to provide photo identification with their ballots.
Those challenges remained tied up in both federal and state courts — including the North Carolina Supreme Court — as a series of nuanced rulings evaluated specific and complex elements related to Griffin’s allegations. Griffin and Riggs recused themselves from the matter when the issue came before the courts they serve on.
The latest, and now final, ruling came Monday when Myers, the federal judge, ruled that the remaining disputed ballots in the contest must be included in the final tally, effectively upholding Riggs’ victory.
Myers wrote that it would be unconstitutional to the toss tens of thousands of ballots that Griffin claimed were ineligible months after they were cast.
“You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done,” Myers wrote in his 68-page order.
Myers’ ruling followed a controversial decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court that allowed election officials to move forward with a period for thousands of military and overseas voters to “cure” their ballots. Myers had earlier blocked that order temporarily to give himself time to review the broader case.
That state Supreme Court decision had found that about about 60,000 of the votes in question cannot be thrown out, but that others could be if minor errors were not fixed, meaning those voters would be required to prove their eligibility to election officials. The invalidation of even a small number of those ballots could have changed the outcome of the election.
The saga emerged as a flashpoint over whether ballots could be tossed long after voters had cast them, an effort that Griffin’s critics warned could be replicated in future attempts to overturn close races.
Those critics noted that Griffin’s arguments contradicted several long-held precedents in election law, including the notion that the rules of an election must be set before voting occurs.