Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to reverse his razor-thin loss for a state Supreme Court seat by disqualifying the ballots of more than 66,000 voters suffered a blow when a Wake County judge tossed his lawsuit Friday.
In a one-page decision issued after hearing arguments from lawyers on both sides of the dispute, Superior Court Judge William Pittman wrote he found no reason to overturn the state Board of Elections decision in December to declare incumbent Allison Riggs the winner by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast.
That ruling followed three recounts demanded by Griffin, himself an appellate judge. Griffin, backed by a state and national Republican Party team, had launched a campaign to disqualify ballots that he claimed shouldn’t have been counted because the voters didn’t fully comply with North Carolina voter-registration law. The great majority of the alleged violations were missing voter ID records, which the Board of Elections and other courts had determined weren’t required.
Griffin’s team showed no evidence of voter fraud, nor did the targeted voters know their ballots had been questioned.
“The Board’s decision was not in violation of constitutional provisions, was not in excess of statutory authority or jurisdiction of the agency, was made upon lawful procedure, and was not affected by other error of law,” Pittman wrote in one of three nearly identical orders rejecting the challenge.
Pittman’s order can be appealed, but opposition to his continued effort is building even within the Republican ranks because of the backlash it has generated.
Griffin’s challenge reached the state Supreme Court last month, where Republicans hold a 5-2 majority.
In a vaguely written 6-0 order with Riggs recusing herself, the high court tossed Griffin’s case back to where it started in Wake County. The justices ruled the case needs to follow the traditional path through the appellate process rather than jumping directly to the state Supreme Court.
Similarly, the Elections Board’s parallel attempt to move the case out of the reach of the state Supreme Court to federal court made it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, before being redirected to the North Carolina courts for lack of federal jurisdiction.
Analysts have found that the groups of voters Griffin has targeted tended to lean toward Democratic Party candidates, which meant that Griffin would likely prevail if they were disqualified.
Opponents at a rally in Raleigh last month protested state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin’s effort to eliminate 66,000 ballots cast by North Carolina voters.// Photo credit: North Carolina Democratic Party
The largest of the groups included more than 60,000 ballots cast during early voting. The second group consisted of voters who live overseas or who serve in the military. The third included a small cohort of overseas residents who typically are family members of military personnel and who don’t live – and may never have lived – in North Carolina.
Recently, the investigative news site ProPublica discovered that Griffin himself had used a military absentee ballot to vote in two state elections when he was deployed as a member of the North Carolina National Guard.
Griffin said he was confident that by disqualifying this bloc of voters in these four counties, he would prevail in a recount.
But the tactic ignited fury among impacted voters, especially those who serve in the military and diplomatic posts.
Typical of these is Air Force Col. Bobby Buckner, a registered Republican who commands a squadron at a U.S. base and who voted an absentee ballot in Buncombe County.
“I would caution this candidate that eroding or challenging our rights to vote because someone does not like the outcome, goes against the very reason I chose to serve my country: freedom and the ability to have a voice,” Buckner previously told Asheville Watchdog.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Tom Fiedler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and dean emeritus from Boston University who lives in Asheville. Email him at tfiedler@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
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.
