Washington, D.C. – On Friday, the North Carolina Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop North Carolina Republicans from attempting to throw out 60,000 votes to steal a State Supreme Court election rightfully won by Democrat Allison Riggs. 

The DNC supports the North Carolina Democratic Party in their fight to ensure that North Carolina Republicans do not get away with their cynical and brazen attempt to overturn the will of the voters. 

DNC Executive Director Sam Cornale issued the following statement:

“North Carolina Republicans’ attempts to throw out 60,000 lawful votes to overturn Justice Allison Riggs’ victory is a brazen and callous attack on the rule of law and North Carolinians’ right to vote, but it isn’t surprising. From trying to take power away from the newly-elected Democratic governor to threatening to overturn the will of the voters, Republicans will stop at nothing in their quest for power. The Democratic National Committee stands with our partners in North Carolina as they fight to ensure North Carolinians keep the government they elected.”

New York Times: “This Race Was Decided by 734 Votes. The G.O.P. Wants to Disqualify 60,000 Ballots.”

• From voter ID laws to district map-drawing to judges redeciding cases, North Carolina has long been a laboratory of sorts in ways to amass political power. In recent years, Republicans in particular have changed both state laws and election rules to hamstring Democrats’ influence.
  
• A lengthy recount of more than 5.5 million ballots from the November election that ended last week showed that an incumbent Democrat on North Carolina’s state Supreme Court, Allison Riggs, held a 734-vote edge over Jefferson G. Griffin, a Republican judge on the state Court of Appeals.
  
• Judge Griffin has not given up. He is protesting the results of the entire election to the State Board of Elections, arguing that many voters were ineligible to cast ballots.
  
• Judge Griffin’s protest argues that voters whose registration forms have no numbers should not count in this election. Among those voters are Ms. Riggs’s parents.
  
• The state Democratic Party has responded with a federal lawsuit asking that the state elections board be barred from throwing out the ballots cited in Judge Griffin’s protest.
  
• In a response to the elections board on Friday, lawyers for Ms. Riggs said the protest amounted to a ludicrous request for a do-over.
  
• “Whether playing a board game, competing in a sport or running for office, the runner-up cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by asking for a redo under a different set of rules,” they said. “Yet that is what Judge Griffin is trying to do here.”
  
• Gerry Cohen, a Democratic member of the Wake County elections board who has been involved in election challenges and protests for more than five decades, called the demands of Judge Griffin’s protest “head and shoulders above anything I have ever seen.”

• In its lawsuit, the state Democratic Party noted that federal law prohibits states from tossing out a ballot because a voter’s registration papers lack a driver’s license or Social Security number.
  
• National and state Republican Party lawyers raised the same claim about missing registration numbers earlier this year in a state lawsuit that sought to strike as many as 225,000 voters from the rolls. The case was later moved to a federal court, which said that a ruling, whenever it comes, should not apply to this election.