A few weeks after the November election, Allison Riggs and her husband were over at her parents’ house in Durham, North Carolina for dinner. Riggs, a candidate for state Supreme Court, was still waiting for her race to be called, but she wasn’t overly concerned with the delay.
A former elections lawyer, she knew that in close contests, the final results can often take days or weeks. And this race was close: On the evening of November 4, Riggs trailed by 10,000 votes, before she ultimately closed the gap, winning by a margin of just 734 out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast.
Riggs, who was already serving on the North Carolina Supreme Court after being appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper to finish out the term of a retiring justice, assumed the counting (and recounting) would run its course and, at some point, the election would be certified. But 178 days later, the race still hasn’t been called.
The ongoing saga represents both a breathtaking escalation in the GOP’s war on free and fair elections, and a crucial test of the strategy Donald Trump’s legal team explored using in 2024 but didn’t need to, since he won.
That night in Durham, at her parents house, was the first moment Riggs got the sense that this wasn’t going to be a normal, protracted race. Offhand, her mother mentioned she had received some post-election “junk mail” from the Republican Party of North Carolina. “It said, ‘Your vote may be the subject of a protest. Scan this QR code,’” she remembers. “My dad, of course, is like: Don’t scan that QR code — You might get a virus on your phone!”
When she saw it, Riggs knew exactly what the mailer was — and she couldn’t believe her opponent was challenging her own mother’s vote. She’d later learn he was challenging her father’s vote, too. Riggs’ parents were among more than 65,000 North Carolina voters whose ballots her rival was seeking to have thrown out after those votes were lawfully cast and accepted by the state board of elections.
In the run-up to last year’s election, observers warned that Trump was contemplating a series of novel strategies to call the 2024 election results into question. All around the country, Republicans were taking control of election boards with the power to certify, or to refuse to certify, election results, and on the campaign trail, Trump was raising questions about the legitimacy of certain ballots — including those cast by military and overseas voters, and their children, some of whom are citizens but have never lived in the U.S.
Trump didn’t end up using any of those tactics in the end — he didn’t need to, as he won the 2024 election handily without them.
But Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin — Riggs’ opponent in the state Supreme Court race — appears to have taken a page out of the book Trump threw away. Griffin has refused to concede, even after two recounts confirmed Riggs’ narrow victory. Instead, he filed a lawsuit arguing the state board of elections improperly allowed 60,000 people to register without providing their driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers, and an additional 5,500 overseas voters improperly cast ballots without presenting a photo ID.
In January, the Supreme Court of North Carolina — the court on which Riggs continues to serve, as this all shakes out — intervened to prevent certification of the election and to allow Griffin’s challenges to proceed through the lower courts. (Riggs recused herself from the matter.)
The dispute has slowly been working its way through the courts since then, leaving a cascade of conflicting rulings in its wake as it does. The state board of elections unanimously upheld the election result and the local Superior Court dismissed Griffin’s suit, before the North Carolina Court of Appeals — the court on which Griffin himself sits — ruled in their colleague’s favor, declaring some 60,000 votes should be thrown out unless those voters came forward to verify their identities. (Griffin did not vote on the matter.) That decision was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld it in part, declaring a smaller number — a few thousand votes — might be invalid. A federal district court has now stepped in, staying the state Supreme Court’s order, while a judge considers the case; that judge — a Trump appointee — has indicated he plans to issue a ruling in the coming days.
Riggs for her part, is committed to fighting to the very end. And as a former voting rights lawyer, she is uniquely prepared and motivated to see the case through to the end.
Riggs grew up in rural West Virginia, the eldest of four children. Both her father and one of her brothers served in the military and were deployed overseas. Riggs herself got an undergraduate degree in microbiology, a masters in history and, finally, a law degree at the University of Florida. As a law student after the 2000 election, Riggs became involved in the effort to restore voting rights to disenfranchised Floridians.
“When you talk about the Florida election in 2000, you think, ‘Oh, 537 votes decided who became president of the United States.’ But in reality, there were tens of thousands of Floridians who were never allowed to cast a ballot because they had been permanently disenfranchised after a youthful mistake or an interaction with the criminal justice system.”
Now, she’s fighting to ensure that voters who lawfully cast votes in November aren’t retroactively stripped of their right to vote. There’s more at stake than her election alone if Griffin and the Republican Party of North Carolina are allowed to reverse the outcome, Riggs says: “If this unconstitutional process happens, the toothpaste is out of the tube. You can’t ever put it back in. People who would want to overturn election results that they don’t like in the future have the green light; they wouldn’t have a federal court saying ‘No, we’re not going to put up with this.’”
As this fight rages on, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed the SAVE Act — legislation that Princeton history professor and Rolling Stone contributor Sean Wilentz has called “the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history [and] an attempt to destroy American democracy as we know it.”
The SAVE Act is unlikely to make it through the U.S. Senate, but as Rolling Stone recently reported, it’s part of a larger GOP jihad on voting rights across the country, with Republicans in state legislatures having introduced more than 2,000 election-related bills since legislative sessions began in January.
Riggs, for her part, is digging in. “I am committed to fighting day in and day out in federal court until we get this right,” she says. “However long it takes, however hard I need to fight, I won this election. The voters spoke and the voters who put trust in me to continue serving in my constitutional office. Now this is my chance to keep faith with them and to fight for what they hired me to fight for, which is their constitutional rights.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
