Stealing an election by disenfranchising service members?

The absurd effort to overturn a North Carolina Supreme Court race by voiding military votes

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Apr 15, 2025

Earlier today, our team filed a class action lawsuit seeking to protect the votes of military families and other North Carolina voters who were abroad when they cast their legal ballots in the November 2024 election, over five months ago.

These votes are being presumptively thrown out because the voters did not include a photo ID image when voting via the state’s online portal. But here’s the thing: The rules for voting in North Carolina expressly exempt military and overseas voters from the photo ID law. The portal used by these voters does not even offer an option to attach a photo ID if they wanted to do so.

Put simply: State courts have ruled that to have their vote counted, military voters should have done something that they were not required to do (and was in fact impossible to do). And because they did not do so, they are now being retroactively disenfranchised, five months after the fact. How does this make any sense?

Read more on the backstory: How to steal an election in America.

Why is the losing candidate, Jefferson Griffin, specifically targeting military and overseas voters for disenfranchisement? Because he ran out of other options to try to overturn the results. He filed over 300 protests after the election, but the State Board and courts have now rejected all but those targeting military and overseas voters. Now he’s only going after voters registered in four of North Carolina’s 100 counties — the ones likely to be most favorable to the winning candidate Justice Allison Riggs. And the state Supreme Court just signed off on this brazen scheme.

To stress: Military and overseas voters. Disenfranchised for not doing something they were not required or able to do. And only because they are registered in a county that leaned towards the winning candidate — and away from the candidate who lost. Absurd.

How we got to this absurd place

Let’s rewind a bit: Judge Jefferson Griffin, who currently sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, challenged incumbent Justice Allison Riggs in the race for the North Carolina Supreme Court seat six. Riggs won by 734 votes, a result that was confirmed by two recounts. Two weeks later, Griffin sued with a goal of throwing out the votes of over 60,000 North Carolinians. More than four and a half months later, Riggs’ win is the last uncertified race in our nation.

In truth, this goes back before the election to a “zombie lawsuit” that the RNC and North Carolina GOP filed on August 23, 2024. That case was not designed to be resolved before the election, but rather to create a pretense for a lawsuit exactly like this one.

The basics of Griffin’s disenfranchisement campaign have defied common sense from the beginning. He sought to disqualify votes only in this specific race and not in all of the other races that the same voters voted for on the same ballots. Originally, he challenged tens of thousands of absentee voters and early in-person voters, which historically tend to vote more Democratic as a group, but not Election Day voters — who have leaned more Republican — for missing ID numbers in their public-facing voter file (info that, in many cases, the voters had actually provided).

Despite Griffin’s efforts to stifle their voice, the voters of North Carolina have continued to speak out:

From the moment Griffin filed his challenges, dozens of North Carolinians contacted both the Griffin campaign and the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) to share their stories as eligible voters and learn what they could do to fight back.
Republican, Democratic, and unaffiliated voters have spoken up on social media, in news stories, on TV, and at rallies.
Thousands of North Carolinians showed up across the state to participate in “The People v. Griffin” rallies and packed courtrooms .
In a letter reflecting a broad spectrum of political ideologies, 200 members of North Carolina’s legal community came together to urge Griffin to concede and finally bring the 2024 election to a close.
Finally, former senior military leaders and other veterans weighed in specifically on the shameless attempt to disenfranchise North Carolina’s military voters and their families, many of whom are currently overseas.

After such enormous public outcry, on Friday afternoon the North Carolina Supreme Court threw out the challenge to the vast majority of domestic voters. But it endorsed Griffin’s protest as applied to voters who have a much harder time making their voices heard: military voters and their families.

Technically, this order also includes another group — voters who are the U.S. citizen children of North Carolina residents who have always lived overseas. (And there are plenty of questions about the validity of that challenge, as well.) But the number of voters in that group is not enough to sway the outcome of the race. So really, this is about the votes of U.S. servicemembers and overseas voters from cherry-picked, urban, Democratic-leaning parts of the state.

Many voters, especially those residing overseas, may still not even know that their votes are being challenged. In fact, one of the overseas plaintiffs Protect Democracy represents just learned she was on the challenged list last week — and not from anyone associated with Griffin or the state.

Despite this, the North Carolina Supreme Court has put the burden on these lawful voters and gave them just 30 days to complete a wholly invented and poorly defined “verification” process or have their votes discarded. Military personnel serving our country overseas, and their families, are far from the election offices they would need to contact. They may struggle to provide this documentation, or to provide it on this timeline, if they can even be reached in the first place.

What happens next

Because this is North Carolina, an analogy: Election certification is like the scorekeeping in a basketball game. Certification does not involve deciding whether a foul was committed in the third quarter, and retroactively changing the score as a result. And it certainly does not include changes to the rules such that a legal play becomes a foul and converts the loser into the winner. Griffin is requesting that the scorekeepers change his loss to a win months after the final buzzer has sounded. So far, the North Carolina Supreme Court and United States District Judge Richard Myers of the Eastern District of North Carolina, who on Saturday partially endorsed the NCSC’s decision, seem eager to play along with this plan.

Our lawsuit asks the federal courts to ensure they cannot.

Several of the people Protect Democracy represents are spouses of active duty servicemembers in the United States military who have diligently maintained their North Carolina voter registration and cast their ballots according to the law, seeking only their fair share of influence in the country to which they have dedicated so much. Our plaintiff Carrie Conley shared these thoughts:

“As a military spouse, I realize I will have to move frequently because of the demands of my husband’s service to our country. Rather than change my voter registration with each of our moves, I have maintained my Guilford County, North Carolina registration and voted there absentee — as is my right and because North Carolina is and always will be my home."

While our plaintiffs’ personal stories are unique, they all deeply value the right to vote and are bravely standing up to share their stories in order to protect the very foundation of our democracy. Our lawsuit asks the federal courts to affirm that retroactive disenfranchisement violates the U.S. Constitution, block the NCSBE from applying post-election criteria to ballots already lawfully cast, and ensure that voters are not forced to clear new legal hurdles to have their ballots counted.

You can read more about the plaintiffs and the case here.

The coming weeks will tell: Will the courts continue to stand up for the fundamental American ideals that voters get to choose who represents them, that the rules apply to all of us equally, and that you can't change those rules after the game is played to retroactively declare your team the winner? Or, will they countenance a political process where power, not principle, is what matters most?

What can you do?

Autocracy thrives on hopelessness. But in this situation we are neither hopeless nor powerless. Here’s how to push back against this attempt to steal an election:

Check the list of challenged voters for yourself and people you know, and encourage others to do the same. Voters with the “X” symbol under the “Reason” column are no longer being challenged.
Spread the word in your community or post on social media. Here are some great news stories you can share (or share this post!).
Our partners at Common Cause North Carolina have created an action alert page where you can be contacted about opportunities to support this effort.
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