Who’s Behind the Attempted Election Theft in North Carolina?

The out-of-state interests trying to disenfranchise North Carolinians

The Stakes

North Carolina’s Republican-dominated courts—with the help of wealthy out-of-state special interest groups—are trying to steal a state Supreme Court seat by throwing out as many as 65,000 North Carolinians’ lawfully cast votes.

Last November, North Carolina state supreme court justice Allison Riggs defeated her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, by 734 votes. In a state that is no stranger to razor-thin supreme court election margins, Riggs’s win has been confirmed by two recounts and an audit. But Griffin is asking the state courts to disenfranchise thousands of North Carolinians—including members of the United States military serving overseas. Only after he lost the election did Griffin claim that the rules these voters followed in registering to vote were illegal.

The North Carolina Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has already endorsed the Republican-controlled legislature’s extreme partisan gerrymanders, which are designed to lock their political opposition out of power. The Republican legislature then disempowered statewide offices that the GOP could not secure via gerrymandering. Just hours after the state’s Election Board rejected Griffin’s challenge, for example, the legislature’s Republican supermajority passed veto-proof legislation to strip the governor—now a Democrat—of the century-old power to choose Election Board members, and to deprive the state’s attorney general—now also a Democrat—from participating in any legal challenges to the legislature’s actions.

The future of representative democracy in North Carolina depends on changing the makeup of the state supreme court so that it can once again bar extreme partisan gerrymandering. The soonest that can happen is in 2028—and the chances of that happening plummet if Justice Riggs’s victory is overturned to install Griffin and create a 6-1 right-wing majority. It’s not a stretch to say that if Griffin’s attempted judicial coup in this case succeeds, it could be the canary in the coal mine for the fate of American democracy itself.

The Dark Money Networks Trying to Silence North Carolinians

Griffin’s sour grapes threaten to destroy North Carolina’s democracy, and he’s getting major help from the right-wing dark-money organizations that are leading similar efforts to capture state and federal courts across the country.

Over the past decade, dark-money impresario Leonard Leo’s enterprise to “weaponiz[e] conservative ideas” has spent heavily to stack state supreme courts across the country with right-wing partisans. The network has funneled millions into campaigns to influence North Carolina’s judicial elections and install Leo’s preferred judges, including some of the same judges that the “Honest Elections Project”—a voter-suppression organization that operates as the “fictitious name” of a major hub Leo’s network—wants to consider Griffin’s election challenge.

HEP is part of a dizzyingly opaque array of groups with ties to Leo and his $1.6 billion war chest. Leo’s Concord Fund has been the largest funder in recent years for the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which in turn has been one of the heaviest spenders in state court races in North Carolina. In 2016, for instance, RSLC gave $500,000 to a group called Fair Judges, which spent $1.2 million supporting incumbent Justice Robert Edmunds. The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce also spent nearly $1.5 million, with $200,000 from Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network (JCN). In 2014, RSLC gave $1.3 million to a group called “Justice for All,” which was active in the state supreme court races. In 2012, RSLC funneled over $1 million to outside groups backing Paul Newby for the state supreme court. JCN also gave $75,000 to Civitas Action, which ran radio ads backing Newby.

In 2022, “Stop Liberal Judges” and “Tough and Fair Judges”—both run by the same person and run out of the same P.O. Box—were the main dark money groups supporting Republican judicial candidates. The Good Government Coalition, which has received millions of dollars from the RSLC, gave $590,000 to Tough and Fair Judges—and is a major funder of “Citizens for a Better North Carolina,” which in turn gave “Stop Liberal Judges” its entire budget of over $5 million.

And last Wednesday, Leo’s HEP filed a brief backing Griffin’s argument to have the case decided by the North Carolina Supreme Court.

When your head stops spinning, the picture that emerges is clear: wealthy extremists have used their dark-money networks to pack North Carolina’s courts, and now are trying to ensure that the courts they packed can disenfranchise thousands of North Carolinians to steal the election for Griffin and cement their illegitimate grip on power.

Plaintiff or Puppet?

What is happening in North Carolina follows the playbook of what the right-wing dark money groups backing Griffin were planning if Trump had lost the state. Griffin is relying on a theory that “was originated and championed by far-right activists working with a conservative organization that was secretly preparing to contest election results if Trump had lost the 2024 election,” as ProPublica reported.

Griffin’s brief relies on a theory and argument that reportedly originated from activists working with the North Carolina chapter of the far-right “Election Integrity Network” to throw out the ballots of voters whose registration files were missing driver's license or Social Security information. ProPublica revealed that Election Integrity Network members in North Carolina had discussed whether the theory could “arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest using this” in a chapter meeting held months before the election.

The national Election Integrity Network is led by Cleta Mitchell, who played a major role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The North Carolina Election Integrity Team, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network, is led by Jim Womack who told attendees at a virtual meeting in October to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as suspicious. The North Carolina Election Integrity Team and Mitchell worked closely with the state legislature on SB 747, a sweeping voter suppression law that included many of the Election Integrity Network’s radical anti-voter priorities.

Griffin’s brief cites a 2023 complaint by Carol Snow to the state Board of Elections alleging the state voter registration forms violated the Help America Vote Act. Although the board enacted changes to the registration forms, Griffin’s brief argues that “the issue has caused irregularities in the protested elections, and those irregularities may well be outcome dispositive.” Snow’s complaint was also cited in a suit filed by the state GOP ahead of the 2024 election that was described in The News & Observer as “fit[ting] a pattern that began in 2020 of ‘preparing arguments for baseless claims that the election was stolen.’” Snow spoke about her theory at a NCEIT press conference in April 2024, and North Carolina Election Integrity Team board member and Asheville Tea Party chair Jane Bilello sent multiple letters to legislators echoing Snow’s assertions.

Is Griffin’s case just a convenient trial balloon for the Election Integrity Network’s roadmap for election theft? If the networks backing Griffin get away with it in North Carolina, it will become the blueprint for how to steal an election and could become the new normal for other states and in other elections.

Where Things Stand Now

On January 22, the state supreme court denied Griffin’s request for the justices’ immediate intervention and ordered him to proceed through the lower courts first. On its face, this decision seems to be a loss for Griffin, but it may actually have the effect of delivering him the stolen seat. That’s because the court now appears deadlocked. Three Republicans have signaled their support for Griffin, while the remaining three participating justices—two Republicans and one Democrat, with Riggs recused—have indicated they’d side with Riggs. If the court had accepted Griffin’s request to skip the lower courts, the deadlock would have had the effect of upholding Griffin’s loss before the Election Board, allowing Riggs to retain her rightfully elected supreme court seat. Instead, the justices ordered the case to pass through Republican-dominated state appeals courts that are more likely to accept Griffin’s bid to steal the election. In that event, a deadlock at the state supreme court would affirm that decision and complete the coup.

Such a result would be a devastating blow for North Carolina’s democracy, and that is why Riggs and the Board of Elections have asked federal courts to remove Griffin’s challenge from the state supreme court justices devoted to promoting the right-wing agenda regardless of what the people want. Earlier this month, however, a Trump-appointed federal district judge rejected Riggs and the Board’s removal request and sent Griffin’s case back to the state supreme court. Riggs and the Board appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But Griffin is now suggesting that the Fourth Circuit may not even have jurisdiction to consider the appeal anymore.

If this all sounds like a big mess, that’s because, undoubtedly by design, it is. At least three out of the five justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court want to steal a seat to entrench and expand their partisan supermajority, and they are trying to buy more time for a process they believe will deliver them their desired outcome. Using the cloud cover of complex legal procedure, these justices and their dark-money backers hope to confuse and disorient people from understanding what they’re really doing here: attempting a judicial coup in plain sight.

The Fourth Circuit doesn’t have to play along, though. The federal appeals court can remove the case to federal court and allow the Board to certify Riggs’s election before the state’s partisan judges steal Riggs’s seat. Even so, the Fourth Circuit may not have the last word: whoever loses before the federal appeals court will very likely seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose own far-right majority justices owe their power to none other than Leonard Leo.

Griffin, for his part, need not be part of this putsch. He can end this all now. If he cares about the people of North Carolina, he must stop trying to disenfranchise them for simply following the rules and concede the race to Justice Riggs.

What You Can Do

• Speak up. Share information on what’s happening in North Carolina with your friends, family, and networks and demand that Griffin stop trying to silence North Carolinians.

• Support organizations rallying the charge in North Carolina against Griffin and the dark money groups behind him, including Common Cause North Carolina, Progress NC Action, and NC For the People Action.

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