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The only uncertified race in the country is officially over, as Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin conceded the highly contested state Supreme Court race to Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs.

The concession came two days after U.S. District Judge Richard Myers ordered the State Board of Elections to certify the 734-vote win for Riggs. Myers, a Trump appointee, dismissed Griffin’s election protests but stayed his order for seven days so that Griffin could appeal. 

But in a statement Wednesday morning, Griffin ended his long legal battle to throw out thousands of ballots and overturn the close 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. “I will not appeal the court’s decision.”

The Impact of Our Reporting

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On May 5, 2025, U.S. District Judge Richard Myers ordered the State Board of Elections to certify Riggs as the winner in the state Supreme Court race. Griffin conceded two days later.

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Myers ruling appeared to reference our April reporting on errors in Griffin’s “never residents” list, as well as our January reporting on Griffin’s challenge to overseas ballots.

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Myers, a Trump appointee, said he would not “change the rules of the game after it had been played.”

Riggs issued a statement, thanking her supporters and criticizing Griffin for engaging in such a lengthy legal battle.

“After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 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,” she said.

In his 68-page ruling Monday, Myers took issue with asking military and overseas voters from some counties to “undertake additional efforts to have their votes counted,” which he said constituted a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

“Overseas military and civilian voters followed the rules as they existed at the time of the election,” he wrote, “but the retroactive change in voting procedure at issue here deprives them of their fundamental right to have their votes counted.”

Myers also appeared to reference our recent reporting on Griffin’s “never residents” list. The state Supreme Court had directed the State Board of Elections to immediately remove 260 ballots, describing them as cast by “overseas voters who have never lived in North Carolina and have never expressed an intent to live in North Carolina.”

But we found that scores of people on that list have actually lived and voted in North Carolina before. 

“The available record contains sufficient evidence that multiple individuals have been misclassified as Never Residents,” Myers wrote. “Judge Griffin makes no attempt to counter that evidence.”

Myers also faulted the state’s appeals courts for their willingness to disqualify some military and overseas votes but not others. Griffin had challenged about 1,700 overseas ballots from Guilford County and thousands more from several other Democratic-leaning counties that he lost by large margins—but not similar ballots from the rest of the state, though, by his logic, they too were illegally cast. 

“When the underlying basis for a protest is a rule that applies statewide, a geographically selective protest raises equal protection concerns and the specter of post-election mischief,” Myers wrote. He added that those concerns “manifest as an equal protection violation when a state adopts the litigant’s selectivity and retroactively applies newly announced rules to a discrete subset of citizens, and not all similarly situated voters.”

Challenges to the race have dragged on since November. On Election Day, it appeared Griffin was going to win by 10,000 votes, which would have given Republicans a 6-1 majority and diminished Democrats’ hopes of reclaiming the court in 2028. 

However, his apparent lead ebbed over the next three weeks as county election officials counted provisional and absentee ballots. When all the votes were canvassed, Riggs was ahead by 734 votes. Two recounts confirmed her lead. 

Griffin initially filed hundreds of protests in all 100 counties. He argued that 817 voters were ineligible because they were felons serving active sentences, had died before Election Day, or were not registered to vote. But county election boards had already discarded 329 of those votes, and they dismissed most of Griffin’s other challenges. 

Then, Griffin asked the State Board of Elections to discount swaths of votes that he argued should not have been counted in the first place. The state board dismissed his protest on December 11, largely because the board said he didn’t give proper notice to affected voters. In an unusual move, he asked the state Supreme Court to block the state board from certifying Riggs’ victory. 

That led to months of the case ping-ponging between state and federal courts. In January, the state Supreme Court remanded the case to Wake County Superior Court, but not before several Republican justices indicated that they’d be willing to grant Griffin’s requests if the case returned to them. 

But for Myers, the heart of the case was “whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible.”

The answer for him on both accounts was no. 

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.

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