North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs joined a U.S. Senate “spotlight forum” on voting rights Wednesday to deliver a stark warning to Democratic lawmakers: efforts to throw out ballots and overturn elections are just getting started.
Riggs took part in a two-hour panel convened by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Rules Committee, and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, alongside former Attorney General Eric Holder and other voting rights experts.
She said that through her opponent Judge Jefferson Griffin’s challenge to around 68,000 ballots, “we came perilously close to watching out system of rules-based elections crumble before our eyes.”
“For six months and two days after the election, I fought to make sure every eligible vote was counted,” Riggs said. “What we experienced wasn’t even just about one person’s vote, or 68,000 people’s votes. It was a more fundamental dispute: Do voters, not politicians decide elections?”
At stake, she stressed, is whether someone can cast a ballot and feel confident it will count. “Instead, it will depend on whether partisan politicians have enough money to throw at a race to litigate the outcome after the fact,” Riggs said.
While the North Carolina Court of Appeals and state Supreme Court ruled in Griffin’s favor — ordering all or at least some ballots to be disposed of, respectively — a Trump-appointed federal judge found that doing so would violate the constitutional rights of voters who did everything they were asked to do.
“Today, even after Justice Riggs has taken her seat, the Trump administration has now taken up the cause and sued North Carolina, threatening to disenfranchise around 100,000 previously registered voters,” Padilla said. “That is not democracy, that is sabotage.”
After the Justice Department sued North Carolina in March on some of the same grounds as the Griffin challenge, the state Board of Elections unveiled a plan to collect missing information from more than 100,000 registered voters, pledging that no one will be removed from voter rolls. North Carolina Democrats have said they remain concerned that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by the effort.
Among the voters challenged in 2024, Riggs noted, were those who cast military and overseas ballots and did not include photo identification — which the North Carolina State Board of Elections instructed they did not need to provide. And she pointed out that the Griffin campaign challenged these ballots specifically in heavily Democratic counties.
Janessa Goldbeck, the CEO of Vet Voice Foundation — a nonprofit voting rights group that intervened in the Griffin-Riggs litigation — told lawmakers that many of the military voters they contacted had no idea their ballots were being challenged, months into the election lawsuit.
“We used every tool in our toolbox to find these folks — social media, phone banking, volunteers going through day after day — but we’re a nonprofit, and the nonprofit organizations that do this work have limits in terms of their capacity,” Goldbeck said. “We can’t compete with a disinformation campaign that is backed by state actors or an administration that has ill intent, and that’s why it’s so important to have proactive voter protection laws.”
Durbin said there should be a “sense of outrage” that Republicans would try to throw out ballots from soldiers serving overseas.
“It just strikes me that this is a ripe political issue in terms of military veterans standing up and saying, ‘stop it,’” Durbin said. “If these military [personnel] are willing to go overseas, endure hardship in their lives and this danger in their lives, the last thing we ever ought to do is challenge their right to vote.”
Veterans were also ensnared in the other, larger pool of ballots challenged by Griffin — voters alleged to have not provided a partial Social Security number or driver’s license number when registering. That dispute included the ballot of Riggs’s own father, she said.
“My father served his country in uniform for 30 years and was deployed in war,” Riggs said. “My father registered using his retired military ID, an eligible form of photo identification that does not have a driver’s license number or Social Security number on it. After registering, he also showed a valid picture ID every time he voted.”
“In an attempt to selectively overturn the results of an election that disgruntled partisans and disappointed politicians disagreed with, my father and these voters nearly lost their fundamental right to vote,” she added.
Riggs said that in total, her efforts to defend her election victory in court cost roughly $2 million on top of the $5 million spent during the election itself. As a former election attorney, she said she was “uniquely suited” to fight back against the effort, and warned that other candidates may be unable to do the same or could be deterred from running altogether.
“Is part of the strategy on the other side to make sure that they spend so much money, the average person can’t fight them?” Durbin asked.
“Absolutely,” Riggs said. “We absolutely should understand it as a cynical ploy to tie up resources and time instead of focusing on the very pressing issues before the people of this country and the constitutional work that people in my seat should be doing.”
“You saw firsthand in North Carolina the challenges, the burdens that happen when there’s these kinds of attacks on democracy when your challenger tried and then failed to throw out tens of thousands of votes,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). “Do these challenges make voters, especially those who decide to skip the elections from time to time, feel welcome to continue participating in our democracy?”
“It’s obvious that they don’t,” Riggs said. “When we erect barriers to political participation, we are sending a clear message about whose voice matters, whose say we want heard in the political process.”
Much of Wednesday’s discussion also centered on Texas Republicans’ efforts to redraw the state’s congressional map to eliminate five Democratic members of Congress — which has provoked retaliatory initiatives from the Democratic leaders of New York, California, and Illinois. North Carolina came under fire for its own 2023 congressional redistricting, which eliminated three Democratic lawmakers and drew a slew of gerrymandering lawsuits.
“In response to a fair 7-7 congressional map in battleground North Carolina, Republicans stole three congressional districts with a judicially sanctioned, egregious gerrymander,” said Holder, the former attorney general. “In my view, partisan or ideological state Supreme Court justices in that state cast aside their own very recent precedent to make possible a gerrymandered 10-4 congressional delegation. Politicians were, in essence, allowed to choose their voters.”
That state Supreme Court decision played a large role in the stakes of the Riggs-Griffin race. Democrats have said they must win a majority on the state Supreme Court by 2030, the next redistricting year, to again strike down gerrymandering in North Carolina. That means winning four out of five judicial races from 2024 to 2028, including Riggs’. After her Democratic colleague Anita Earls’ 2026 race, the next three seats in contention are all Republican-held.
“A state like North Carolina, which is likely to have the most competitive U.S. Senate race, where my colleague, Justice Anita Earls, is in a tough fight to keep her seat — we can do this,” Riggs said at the panel. “I want folks to understand that folks only try and silence voices and votes that they’re scared of.”
Toward the end of the panel, Riggs highlighted what she saw as cause for optimism — the fact that during her team’s efforts to cure military and overseas ballots that the state courts had ruled should be thrown out, they were able to reach a military member stationed as far away as Antarctica.
“North Carolinians can reach as far as the South Pole to make sure that each other’s voices are heard,” Riggs said. “We will find that silver lining, keep fighting, and even though we know we these will keep coming until policymakers push us in a different direction, we’re up to that fight.”
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