May 7 (Reuters) – A Republican candidate for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court in November’s election conceded defeat on Wednesday, ending his legal efforts to have thousands of ballots thrown out six months after the final votes were cast.
Judge Jefferson Griffin conceded two days after a federal judge delivered a victory for Democratic sitting Justice Allison Riggs by ordering North Carolina’s election board to not throw out any ballots cast by voters in the close race.
“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.”
Riggs said in a statement she was “glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day.”
Riggs has been vying for a full eight-year term on the high court following her 2023 appointment to the court by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper to fill a vacancy on the seven-member tribunal, whose justices are elected.
The court has a 5-2 Republican majority. Democrats, with an eye toward future fights over redistricting and abortion access, sought to keep control of Riggs’ seat so they could potentially regain a majority in future elections.
Griffin, a member of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, led Riggs by nearly 10,000 votes in the immediate hours after polls closed on November 5. But that lead dwindled as more ballots were counted, and after recounts, Riggs was leading by 734 votes.
Griffin then sought in court to have set aside over 60,000 ballots cast by voters whose registrations were accepted despite having not provided driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers as state law required.
The state’s high court last month declined to toss those ballots. But it said some military and overseas voters whose ballots Griffin challenged for not providing photo identification would need to verify their eligibility within a 30-day period.
That opened the door to potentially thousands of votes still being thrown out, prompting Riggs to urge a federal judge to prevent what she called an unprecedented legal effort to overturn an election.
Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump in Raleigh, agreed with her on Monday, saying Griffin cannot under the U.S. Constitution “change the rules of the game after it had been played.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Richard Chang)