‘Democracy being defended.’ Griffin case comes full circle while entering a new chapter
by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press February 7, 2025
RALEIGH — Over 100 people stood in a line wrapped around the 10th floor of the Wake County Courthouse on Friday — an hour before Jefferson Griffin made his latest attempt to remove over 60,000 voters from the count in the Republican’s continual bid for a seat on the state’s highest court.
Some held bright green slips of paper declaring, “My vote matters.” Others debated how the N.C. Supreme Court may rule on the case, where it is expected to eventually return. Very few made it into the packed courtroom, whose maximum capacity was fewer than 60 people.
The court hearing marked the latest chapter in what seems to be an endless saga. And as Griffin pushes for a decision that’s in his favor, others are pushing back.
Outside, protesters stood on the courthouse steps for about an hour, holding signs, chanting “Every vote counts” and taking turns adressing the crowd.
Lily Levin was on a Fulbright scholarship in Chile when she voted overseas, and said she wasn’t surprised to find that her ballot was being challenged by Griffin.
“I think it’s the cynicism of growing up in a state that has been so extremely gerrymandered,” Levin explained. “My vote might be disenfranchised right now, that’s what we’re fighting for, but so many other people’s votes have been disenfranchised for so long.”
How we got here
After losing to Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 732 votes, Griffin filed a series of election protests to remove three categories of voters from the count.
The first implicates 5,509 military and overseas voters who did not attach any photo identification to their ballot. The State Board of Elections contends that North Carolina law does not include these people in the recently implemented voter ID law. Griffin argues that the election board incorrectly interpreted the legislature’s intent when allowing these voters to cast ballots without photo ID.
The second protest challenges 267 overseas voters who have never resided in North Carolina but are permitted to vote in the jurisdiction their parents were last eligible under state law. Griffin asserts that this law violates the state constitution’s residency requirement, and therefore should not have been followed.
The third and maybe most significant protest challenges 60,273 voters who Griffin alleges are unlawfully registered to vote since their registration was accepted without a driver’s license or social security number due to a faulty voter registration form. The State Board of Elections says that voters can’t be punished for clerical errors, and had to take extra steps to prove their identity if they did not include either number under the federal Help America Vote Act.
While the arguments are unique to each category, they fall along the same themes. Griffin believes that the State Board of Elections violated North Carolina law or the state constitution in each case by accepting these votes.
On the other hand, the election board asserts the law was followed as it stood on Election Day, and that retroactively removing voters’ ballots from the count is unconstitutional.
Since December, Griffin’s election protests have tracked a convoluted journey through state and federal courts. Now, the case is back at the beginning: trial court.
The Wake County Superior Court is expected to rule in Riggs’ favor. Appeals are anticipated afterward.
Most expect the case to eventually return to the N.C. Supreme Court, where three justices have indicated they would deny Griffin’s request to remove votes from the count, two have shown a more positive reception and one has not shared his thoughts.
Certain elements of the case remain under the jurisdiction of federal courts, but won’t come into play unless certain questions remain unresolved by the time the parties exhaust their state court options.
Until then, the race holds an unusual distinction as the final election that has not been certified in the country.
Griffin goes after voters
When Denise Carman moved back to Chatham County from Alamance County in 2020, she filled out a voter registration form. She did not include a driver’s license or social security number. Carman doesn’t know why, but she does know that she was allowed to vote every year since. Carman even served as a Chatham County election official.
Now, she is one of 26 impacted voters named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
“I’m very frustrated that myself and others have been called out,” she said. “I’m part of the lawsuit because I know this won’t deter me in the future, and I worry that if this is just allowed to happen, that it will deter people from voting — other people who aren’t as engaged in the process.”
Felix Soto is also named in the suit. Soto, 18, was determined to participate despite being in Costa Rica for a fellowship. Solo requested a ballot, and included a photocopy of a passport just in case, but was informed by his local county board of elections that it wasn’t necessary. So when Soto resubmitted the ballot due to unrelated clerical issues, the photo ID was left out.
Now, Griffin wants Soto’s ballot removed because of that.
“That was a slap in the face because I worked so, so hard to get my ballot in with all the different back and forth,” Soto recalled. “And my parents worked so hard, too. They’re so proud of me — that I am a voter, that I worked to have my voice heard — and this entire kerfuffle is an affront to all that I have worked for.”
Griffin’s ‘baseless claims’
Not all voters have an equal chance of appearing on Griffin’s protest lists. For one, he only challenged those who voted early or by mail.
Additionally, youth voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are over three times as likely to have their ballots challenged than those over 65, according to Duke’s Student Voting Rights Lab analysis.
A disproportionate number of the 60,000 challenged because of their voter registration were people of color, unaffiliated voters or those who opted not to include their race, gender or ethnicity on their voter registration, according to a separate analysis conducted by Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper.
Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs addresses the crowd outside the Wake County Courthouse on Friday. Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press
Griffin’s protest concerning overseas voters only included people from four largely Democratic counties: Durham, Forsyth, Buncombe and Guilford.
Audrey Megis has spent her entire life and career working to uplift Asian American voices like her own. She’s frustrated that after a record turnout for Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, Griffin is “attempting to cut those numbers down.”
“I’m tired of candidates using my vote as a pawn in their political game and entertaining these baseless claims,” she said.
Two years ago, Tanner Willeford watched as his wife sang “America the Beautiful” during her naturalization ceremony at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds.
It was the culmination of a “long, difficult process” that took thousands of dollars, five years of paperwork and interviews, Willeford said.
After this year’s election, Willeford’s wife found out she was one of the voters on Griffin’s protest list.
“To finally get the chance to vote after all that and then have it be challenged? It was crushing,” Willeford said Friday outside of the courthouse.
Lori Barker stood in for her loved one on the courthouse steps. Her partner, a physician, had to work, she explained. They found out his vote was challenged after a Facebook friend posted about unexpectedly being on the list and encouraged everyone to check.
“The spin in the news was that they were illegal votes, and it never would have occurred to me that he would have been one of the disenfranchised voters,” Barker said.
After combing through the list, Barker found three other people she knew on her county’s list. She confirmed that they all voted in person with a valid photo ID.
Barker teared up as she spoke about her 9-year-old daughter, who still “believes in the goodness of the world.”
“I want her to grow up in a country of democracy,” she said. “This is not about my candidate winning or my issue winning; it is about the democracy being defended. And unless we fight for it, I feel like it won’t exist in the future.”
www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-03-24 14:48:00
(The Center Square) – Citing national security, foreign influence on higher education in America and transparency, a report from Americans for Public Trust says a North Carolina private university received more than $94.1 million in foreign money last year.
Duke University, in Durham, was only behind Cincinnati ($237.1 million), Cornell ($203.8 million), Harvard ($150.1 million), Stanford ($125.9 million), Juilliard ($119.9 million), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($106 million) and Texas A&M ($102 million). Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit report author, said elected leaders need to “crack down on reporting lapses” at the institutions,
“For far too long, a staggering amount of foreign money has flowed into our colleges and universities with little to no transparency or oversight,” Sutherland said in a release. “Much of these foreign funds can be traced back to countries that have well-established adversarial relationships with the United States or engage in direct or indirect malign activities against our country. It is no coincidence that, in the same time period, we’ve seen a rise in anti-American demonstrations and radical ideas being cultivated at these institutions.”
The DETERRENT Act, shepherded in the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington, is billed as “defending education transparency and ending rogue regimes engaging in nefarious transactions.” It expands oversight and disclosure requirements related to foreign sources and institutions of higher education.
The bill was filed Feb. 15 and includes reporting to the Department of Education. Since then, President Donald Trump has called for the elimination of the department though not all its activities. Those, such as Pell Grants, would be transferred to another oversight authority.
Foreign gifts and contracts exceeding $250,000 to American colleges and universities must be disclosed, per federal law. Americans for Public Trust says “fewer than 300 of the approximately 6,000 U.S. institutions self-report foreign money each year.”
The nonprofit accuses “bad actors” of using “foreign funding to influence research, campus policies, and the curriculum to push anti-American narratives.” It further said, “some of the largest foreign contributors to U.S. schools include countries with histories of espionage, intellectual property theft, and efforts to sow discord in America.”
by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press March 24, 2025
North Carolina voters are partial to purple — in a political sense, at least. In last year’s statewide elections, they opted for six Democratic and eight Republican outcomes. While Republican President Donald Trump carried the state by three points, voters also chose Democrats Josh Stein for governor and Jeff Jackson as attorney general. Republicans and Democrats also split victory spoils in Council of State and statewide judicial races. In fact, no state was more split than North Carolina.
Split-ticket voting, or choosing different parties for different offices, is not a new trend in North Carolina. In the past half century, voters have chosen a governor of one party and a president of another in eight of 13 elections as well as different parties for senator and governor in six of eight elections.
But in an increasingly nationalized political scene, the purple pattern gets more peculiar.
“It seems like North Carolina is the exception to the rule,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “Almost everywhere else in America, there’s no ticket splitting.”
Split decisions
In a sense, the impetus of North Carolina’s ticket-splitting culture may be geography.
As a peripheral southern state, North Carolina has found itself caught between the political ideologies of the North and South throughout history, Cooper said.
“The South was overwhelmingly Democratic,” he explained. “We were not as Democratic as our southern neighbors, and when the South went overwhelmingly Republican, we didn’t go quite as Republican as our neighbors. We’re sort of sitting somewhere in the middle.”
After the South switched to Republican support, rural North Carolina Democrats held on to power in some offices. But that’s also changed. Now, rural North Carolinians tend to vote Republican while urban voters lean Democratic.
While the environment that originally allowed the state’s ticket-splitting culture to develop is history, there are several newer factors that continue the trend.
For one, North Carolina is among the fastest-growing states, with steady growth since the 1990s, Carolina Demography Director Nathan Dollar said. Most of that growth comes from people moving to North Carolina from other states and countries — 47% of the population was born out of state, including a 9.3% foreign-born population.
They come here largely from Florida, New York and South Carolina, Dollar said, and tend to gravitate towards urban areas. They include younger people, who are more likely to register unaffiliated, and older, wealthy retirees. And they naturally bring different cultural norms and political ideologies with them.
Those moving to North Carolina for jobs may have more formal education, which is sometimes a trait of split-ticket voters, according to Cooper. But besides that, he said there doesn’t seem to be any major demographic patterns of split-ticket voters.
Republican state Rep. Harry Warren sees the impacts of growth in his Rowan County district, which has a history of Scottish and Irish immigration.
“You have people from different nationalities that came into the state and are bringing with them their personal histories and experiences,” Warren said. “And I think it’s just a carryover generationally, as people pass down their values and their beliefs from one generation to the next.”
One of the biggest stories in state politics — and a significant contributor to North Carolina being purple — is the rise of unaffiliated voters. Since Republicans opened their primaries to unaffiliated voters in 1988, unaffiliated registration has steadily increased (Democrats subsequently opened their primaries in 1996).
“I think that probably leads to a little bit more ticket splitting as well because these are people that are not moored to a party in the way that a registered Democrat or registered Republican might be,” Cooper said.
In 2018, unaffiliated voter registration surpassed Republican registration; it later overtook Democratic registration in 2022. Now, 38% of registered voters are unaffiliated. These unaffiliated voters are disproportionately younger and from out-of-state. Warren said that likely reinforces the purpleness of the state.
North Carolinians’ desire to vote in a more purple way led to the elimination of the straight ticket option in a 2013 election omnibus bill sponsored by Warren. Eliminating the option meant that North Carolina voters could no longer check a box at the top of their ballots to automatically vote for all the Democratic or Republican candidates; they had to fill out each race separately.
“It encourages people then to go out and learn about the candidates and evaluate the candidates on the basis of their policies and what they’re proposing, rather than just arbitrarily voting for a party right down the line,” Warren said.
A ‘blue dot in a red city’
Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers is a Democrat, but he’s “not one of those,” according to his majority Republican constituents.
Growing up with a father and grandfather heavily involved in politics, Smathers was taught to qualify his Democratic identity; he was a “North Carolina Democrat” or a “Jim Hunt Democrat.” That is to say, more moderate than the national Democratic Party.
While most Canton elections are technically nonpartisan, with no “D” or “R” next to candidates’ names, Smathers is a “blue dot in a red city.” Republicans hold every seat on the Haywood County Board of Commissioners and Canton went for Trump by a 34-point margin in the 2024 election.
But no Republican challenged Smathers in his 2017 and 2021 mayoral races.
That makes sense to Smathers; so much of local government is practical leadership, or “getting things done.” People judge him and his team based on their accomplishments, not their party affiliation.
In Canton, that’s meant leading the community through the aftermath of 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred, a subsequent paper mill closure and, now, Helene recovery.
After Helene hit, there was a decision made among local leaders, Smathers recalled.
“We knew how toxic the political climate was, and so it’s not saying everyone always agrees, but all of us have made a really strong effort to make this bipartisan in some regards,” Smathers said. “We want that to be one of the lasting legacies of all these crises that we have faced in Canton.”
North Carolinians often split their ticket along federal and state lines. That tracks for Smathers.
If he ever gets criticized, it’s usually for something the national Democratic Party did, he said.
“I think out here, even ones who didn’t vote for him, I think people respect (former Democratic Gov.) Roy Cooper, I think people are thinking Josh Stein’s doing a good job…They view myself, people like Gov. Stein, differently than people at the national level.”
Democracy at work
States like North Carolina tend to get a lot of attention — in the form of candidate visits and ad spending — during presidential election years. In the past three presidential elections, North Carolina has been among the top three most-visited states.
Does that translate to special political favors from national politicians? Not really, Western Carolina’s Cooper said.
However, being a split-ticket state does have some other political reverberations. It forces candidates running for statewide office to make broader appeals to a more diverse electorate, Warren said.
And it pushes people like Stein, faced with a majority Republican legislature, to include and acknowledge the GOP in task forces and speeches.
But while splitting the ticket may appear to encourage politicians to reach across the aisle, at least rhetorically, it doesn’t necessarily lead to more moderate policy, Western Carolina’s Cooper said.
“In a close state, when you get power, you try to use it quickly, and so they tend to act with haste more often,” he said. “So actually you see, in some ways, less moderate actions in closer states because they know they have to act right then or else they might lose power.”
This session’s Senate Bill 58 is a prime example of that type of policy, according to Democracy NC Policy Director Katelin Kaiser.
Senate Bill 58, presented by a Republican-led legislature, would bar the attorney general, a newly-elected Democrat, from filing litigation against any presidential executive order.
Kaiser sees the move as trying to “undermine certain choices of voters.”
“Seeing split tickets in North Carolina, that is North Carolinians’ choice to be able to have and decide,” she said. “And so if they want a Republican president and they want a Democratic attorney general, that is, I think … democracy working.”
SUMMARY: North Carolina’s new State Treasurer, Brad Brer, aims to make the state pension plan more aggressive to achieve higher returns, comparing the current investment strategy to driving too slowly. He suggests potentially investing in assets like Bitcoin, albeit cautiously, starting with a very small percentage despite legislative allowance for up to 10%. Brer also faces a significant deficit in the State Health Plan. His proposed solutions include seeking more funding from lawmakers and implementing a sliding scale for premium increases. He also intends to reinstate coverage for weight loss drugs, viewing them as a long-term cost-saving measure. While acknowledging the need for legislative cooperation, Brer believes his role is largely non-political.
North Carolina State Treasurer Brad Briner left a career in high finance to pursue one of the highest-pressure roles in state government. Briner oversees the state pension plan and the state health plan, which serve hundreds of thousands state government employees, retirees and their families. Briner recently spoke with WRAL’s Dan Haggerty about everything from investment strategies to coverage of weight-loss drugs. Haggerty offers highlights from their wide-ranging conversation.
