The Never-Ending Supreme Court Race

Update: All 100 counties finished their recounts Tuesday morning. Democrat Allison Riggs is leading by 734 votes. This is not the end, however. Republican Jefferson Griffin is asking for a hand-to-eye recount and is challenging the ballots of 60,000 voters. Stay tuned.

The state Supreme Court race is now entering its fifth week, with no sign of wrapping up in the near future. 

Democrat Allison Riggs was ahead by 643 votes in the machine recount as of Monday, with five counties still completing their recount.

Her opponent, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has requested a hand recount, which will cover 3 percent of precincts in each county in the state. 

The sample recount “is used to determine whether a full hand-to-eye recount of all ballots cast statewide is required,” the State Board of Elections explained in a release. If those results differ from the machine recount “such that extrapolating the amount of the change to the entire state … would result in reversing the results,” the board will order a statewide hand recount.

The board will do a random drawing on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m to determine what precincts will be recounted.

The closely-watched race has had more neck-twisting moments than the 1973 film The Exorcist. By the end of election night, Griffin, who currently serves as a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, led by just over 10,000 votes. But as county elections officials continued counting provisional and mail-in absentee ballots, Riggs ended 625 votes ahead. State law allows a candidate to request a machine recount if the difference in total votes is 10,000 or fewer, which Griffin did on November 19. 

Griffin has also filed election protests against 60,000 ballots in all 100 counties that could extend the race indefinitely. Among the ballots he challenged were those cast by Riggs’ own parents. Griffin’s attorneys have alleged that ineligible votes were counted from people who failed to provide either a driver’s license or Social Security number on their voter registration, had a felony conviction on their record, or died between when they cast their ballot and Election Day. 

He is also challenging a state law that allows people who live overseas but have never resided in the state to cast a ballot if their parents are registered to vote here. Last week, Griffin and two Republican state Senate candidates asked the state Supreme Court to take up a case dealing with the international issue. 

Then just 15 minutes before the State Board of Elections hearing on November 26, Griffin filed a motion seeking to disqualify one of the three Democratic board members, Siobhan O’Duffy Millen. Griffin said Millen has a conflict of interest because her husband, Pressly Millen, had represented Riggs. 

Pressly Millen, a partner in the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson, said he represented Riggs in a dispute over a campaign ad that Griffin’s campaign put out that alleged Riggs was under investigation for an ethics violation. He sent a cease-and-desist letter to Griffin’s campaign, stating that the ad was false. 

Two other attorneys from the law firm represent Riggs in the election protest, and his law firm, like others, has an ethics screen that prevents him from seeing anything having to do with election protests. Since his wife became a state elections board member, Millen said, he has never appeared before the board on any legal matter. 

In his motion, Griffin’s attorneys pointed out that Siobhan Millen attended a November 20 board meeting remotely from the couple’s kitchen. The motion contains a screenshot of her in the couple’s kitchen during the Zoom meeting. 

“The public cannot avoid questioning the objectivity of Ms. Millen when she openly sits in the living room of the de facto leader of Justice Riggs’s legal team while she determines the fate of Justice Riggs’s election,” Griffin’s attorneys write in the motion.

Millen scoffed at the idea that this represents a conflict of interest. 

“The whole thing seems kind of silly to me,” he said. “They make a statement in there that it’s somehow problematic that she was attending a meeting from the home that we share … I really don’t know what they’re doing other than throwing everything against the wall and see what sticks.” 

The State Board of Elections will have to hold a hearing to determine whether Siobhan Millen should recuse herself. The board has a 3-2 Democratic majority. A hearing has not been scheduled. 

It is not at all clear when all of this legal wrangling will be resolved. Paul Shumaker, a consultant with Griffin’s campaign, said the candidate is exploring “all options given a lot of the issues that have been discovered.” 

A Riggs win would still leave Republicans with a 5-2 majority–but would give Democrats more hope of retaking the majority in four years. 

Riggs’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, but Riggs posted on X on November 27 that she was grateful “for the voters and election workers who make democracy work” and that she would continue to uplift stories of the 60,000 voters Griffin is challenging.

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.