the Assembly: “No members of the state’s Rules Review Commission—all appointed by the Republican-led General Assembly—flagged it before signing off on the voter ID rules on March 27, 2024, according to meeting minutes. (Senate leader Phil Berger’s daughter, Ashley Snyder, heads the commission’s staff.) Lawyers for the state and national GOP hadn’t mentioned the exemption in a January 2024 letter proposing changes to the rules, nor did it feature in voluminous pre-election litigation, either.
In short, few people seemed to care.
Until, that is, Jefferson Griffin came up 734 votes short in his bid to become a North Carolina Supreme Court justice. In an election protest and court filings, Griffin, a Republican Court of Appeals judge, has argued that the ballots of 5,509 overseas and military voters should be tossed. If that happened, he believes he’d win.
Griffin is probably right about that. All of those voters come from four overwhelmingly Democratic counties—Buncombe, Guilford, Forsyth, and Durham—that voted for his opponent, incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, by at least 15 percentage points. Griffin did not challenge the vast majority of overseas and military voters who cast ballots in North Carolina, according to state elections board records.
Griffin declined to explain why he targeted only Democratic strongholds. His lawyer did not respond to questions.”