Riggs or Rigged? North Carolina Republicans are trying to overturn a statewide election, with ominous implications for 2026 and beyond.
- Harrison Moore
- Apr 15
- 8 min read
Earlier this month, Fox News viewers in North Carolina were treated to an ominous political spot warning about a plot bent on “stealing” a major statewide election. Such incendiary rhetoric is, regrettably, commonplace in modern America, and campaign ads are a staple in one of the US’s seven key swing states. However, this ad came with an odd twist: it wasn’t fretting about an upcoming election, but rather addressed one that had already taken place more than five months ago.
The ad, by a group called Justice Project Action, addressed the still-unresolved election for one of the seven seats on North Carolina’s supreme court. This race saw the appointed Democrat, the unfortunately-named Allison Riggs, finish narrowly ahead of her Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin. Narrowly doesn’t really do it justice: just 734 votes separated the two candidates, out of well over five million votes counted. Proportionally, the two vote totals are separated by the difference between adding or removing a single paperclip to a 12-kg weight (or 27.5lb for our American friends).
The outcome remains in limbo, with the final results of the election still uncertified. Rather than concede to Riggs, who will hold her seat until the election is certified, Griffin sued to prevent more than 60,000 ballots from counting. On the 4th of April, the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in his favour. This decision was partially overturned by the state Supreme Court on the 11th of April. However, a majority composed exclusively of Republican judges upheld the requirement for thousands of overseas and military voters to present photo ID in North Carolina within 30 days of notification. These voters, predominantly Democrats, had never been told that they would face such a requirement ahead of the election in November, as reported by NC Newsline.
Of course, the very idea of an election to a state supreme court will strike most readers as bizarre. Fewer than a half dozen countries hold elections for judicial positions, according to the US Federal Judicial Centre’s Judiciaries Worldwide, although 21 US states hold competitive elections for these positions. North Carolina is one of seven which takes it a step further, requiring its state supreme court judges to win competitive partisan elections – where a candidate with an ‘R’ next to their name goes up against one with a ‘D’ next to theirs. Of course, many officially non-partisan races become partisan races by proxy. Wisconsin’s supreme court election this April pitted a self-styled conservative supported by Elon Musk against a liberal with the support of moderate Democrats. However, printing the name of established political parties on a ballot next to a supposedly impartial jurist is an entirely different phenomenon.
You can’t help but wonder what the implications of this are for the justice system. Imagine, as a private citizen, appearing before a state judge whom you actively opposed or even campaigned against. It is well understood that the very existence of judicial elections also alters the incentive structure for judges. The Brennan Center found that judges tend to impose harsher sentences during election years, influenced by concerns over how their decisions might be portrayed in future campaign ads. Judges “do keep in mind what the next 30-second ad is going to look like”, according to Oliver Diaz, a former Mississippi Justice.
I digress. This article will not dive any deeper into a debate over the merits of electing judges (for the record, I am not in favour). Instead, this election – a high-profile, statewide contest in a pivotal swing state - serves as a useful case study to explore two twin anxieties that kept Democrats up at night ahead of last year’s presidential election.
The Spectre of a Close Election
First, there is the fear that a future Federal election in the US will be so close that the outcome is reasonably in doubt. Secondly, there is the concern that election results could be portrayed as uncertain, and that this serves as justification for the result to be subverted.
On the first point, the narrow polling gap between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris last year, combined with the imprecision of US opinion polls in Trump’s previous elections, created a sense that 2024 was America’s “most uncertain election” in modern times. Of course, that uncertainty did not necessarily mean the election’s final result would be exceptionally close. However, a very close election would have been in keeping with recent trends. The electoral college in 2016 and 2020 was decided by fewer than 80,000 and 50,000 votes respectively in just three swing states, while 2000 was infamously decided by just 537 votes in the state of Florida. Indeed, modern American national campaigns raise and spend so much money on targeted advertising and turnout, and each have such large loyal bases of support, that it may be the norm in this era for every election to be fought almost to a draw. Coupled with the ridiculously slow pace of vote counting in many parts of the US, it is easy to see why many expected the outcome of 2024’s election to be in doubt for days.
These are not even the closest elections modern America has seen. In 2017, Republicans held a 51-49 majority in Virginia’s house of delegates. However, they won their 51st seat, the 94th District, on the basis of a coin toss, as both candidates received exactly 11,608 votes. Had Democrats won one more vote in that district (or won the coin toss), 50-50 legislature would have required a power sharing agreement, as had happened after the 1997 election. At least in 2017 the people of Newport News knew there had been a tie in their race. In New Hampshire’s 1974 Senate election, the identity of the winner kept changing with each recount, so the entire election was held again the following year. The final vote count in the original race had the two candidates separated by only two (2) votes out of more than 220,000, although the rerun saw the Democrat prevail by 10% on higher turnout.
Of course, few believed that the 2024 election could ever be settled by a coin toss, or that either candidate would be happy to stand back and allow the whole thing to be rerun. Instead, a close election would provide cover to litigate the validity of certain ballots. This brings us to the second point, the fear that the Republican party would seek to overturn an election that they lost. As president, Trump had infamously cast doubt on the 2020 election results, culminating in the January 6th attack on the Capitol as Congress was ceremonially counting the results. This signalled to many Democrats that he would not quietly concede if he lost again. His refusal to concede last time had already significantly undermined public trust in the electoral process: to this day, a majority of Republicans believe he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. His repeated insistence the election could be stolen (from him), urging his supporters to make sure they voted in numbers "too big to rig", further fuelled concerns across the political spectrum that a close election could be manipulated.
The precedent set in 2000 made such fears all the more credible. Many believe the Supreme Court tipped the scales in favour of George W. Bush by halting a recount in Florida that Gore could have won. With a majority of Americans disapproving of the US Supreme Court in the run-up to the election, it was clear that many Democrats were apprehensive about a repeat.
Of course, Trump went on to sweep the swing states – by narrow margins – and to win a thin plurality of the popular vote, with Harris quickly conceding defeat. However, the litigation surrounding North Carolina’s excruciatingly tight supreme court race shows what might have happened in 2024 had the result been closer, and what might happen in a future federal election.
A Canary in the Coal Mine?
Griffin’s attempt to subvert the outcome of a tightly-contested contest is not uncontroversial. An open letter by more than 200 North Carolinian jurists has called on him to concede defeat and bring the 2024 election cycle to a close. This list includes prominent Republicans, such as Marshall Hurley, the state GOP’s former General Counsel, and Bob Stephens, the General Counsel to Pat McCrory, who was the state’s last Republican governor in the mid-2010s.
Nevertheless, four of the five Republicans currently sitting on the state Supreme Court upheld part of a Court of Appeals ruling that threatens to disenfranchise thousands of overseas and military voters, months after they cast their ballots in accordance with the then-published rules of the election. Understandably, Riggs appealed the ruling to a Federal court, the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, four of whose five judges were appointed by Republican presidents. On Saturday 12th April, that court ordered the state’s election authority to go ahead with requiring overseas voters to come to the state with their ID as they decide the case.
You can expect Riggs’ team to waste no time before appealing any defeat in this court to the higher Circuit Court. Nonetheless, this race is important for more than just the composition of North Carolina’s highest court. If Riggs’ apparent victory is overturned, it will create a precedent the GOP – or Democrats – might be able to exploit in a future close election.
North Carolina has served as something of a testing ground for the GOP’s illiberal impulses in the past. After the 2010 census, state Republicans drew a map which elected a 9-4 Republican majority in a state Obama had carried in the previous election. In 2016, after the US Supreme Court found that map was a racially motivated gerrymander intended to dilute the power of Black voters, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature was required to come up with a new map. Staggeringly, the chair of the committee they chose for this task openly stated that he “drew this map” while thinking that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats”. Repeated court-ordered redraws have meant the state has not used the same map for two elections in a row since 2018.
By 2025, both parties have used partisan gerrymandering to lock in advantages in each state that mostly cancel out at the federal level, leaving the country with a very small number of competitive seats. This narrow playing field has left the US with a string of narrow House majorities, with the two parties separated by less than ten seats in the 435-member House in each of the three elections since 2020. Such narrow majorities raise the stakes in each of the battleground seats, increasing the risk that a contested outcome in an individual race would not just threaten to overturn the will of that seat’s voters – it could overturn the national House majority.
This context is crucial to consider the risk posed by the attempt to subvert North Carolina’s 2024 Supreme Court race. North Carolina has already served as a testing ground for partisan gerrymandering, which is now endemic in US elections. If this election is indeed overturned, it gives the GOP especially a blueprint for how to pick and choose whose votes should be counted after an election is held, allowing them to subvert the results of exceptionally competitive elections. The Democrats’ nightmare scenario for 2024 – the return of Donald Trump with full GOP control of Washington – has already come true. North Carolina shows how America could find itself in a very different nightmare in the near future: a federal election decided, not at the ballot box, but in a courtroom. Not by voters, but by judges.
By Harrison Moore
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