Latest news with #AllisonRiggs
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
With Riggs in place, NC Democrats launch Anita Earls' 2026 Supreme Court campaign
The midterm elections are well over a year away, but North Carolina Democrats have already begun one campaign in earnest. With national interest attuned to the courts as federal judges seek to limit President Donald Trump's unprecedented efforts to reshape government and North Carolina still reeling from a lengthy battle over the 2024 state Supreme Court election results, Justice Anita Earls kicked off her reelection campaign Friday with a sobering message: 'Our courts are the last hope as the guardians of our democracy — and that is no exaggeration,' Earls, a Democrat seeking her second term on the state's high court, told supporters at a fundraiser in Durham. The state Supreme Court has been front-and-center over the last six months as Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin unsuccessfully sought to overturn his 2024 loss to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs. With Riggs's victory now safely certified, the party shifts its attention to defending Earls' seat — the first step in its long term plan to regain control of the powerful court in 2028. Republicans gained a 5-2 majority on the court after the 2022 midterms. Shortly after taking office, the new majority reversed previous rulings on gerrymandering and election law, upholding the Republican-controlled legislature's ability to draw maps that favor their own party and their push to require ID at the polls. 'They have wielded the courts in political power, and they have utilized the fact that they have extreme Republicans on these benches right now that are willing to bend the knee to do anything for the state legislature,' Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, told The News & Observer. Three Republican justices are up for reelection in 2028. If Democrats can defend Earls' seat in 2026, they'll only have to win two of those races to retake control of the court. The stakes are high in a state where most major legislation and electoral maps are challenged in court. Earls said voters need look no further than the Supreme Court's handling of the election dispute over one of its own seats to understand why a change is needed. When Griffin's case came before the high court, it dismissed his most sweeping challenge to the election results. However, all but one of the Republican justices agreed to allow a 30-day ballot review period for challenged military and overseas votes that could have resulted in thousands of votes being cancelled. A federal judge later reversed this ruling and ordered the state to certify Riggs as the winner of the election. 'Four members of my court were willing to throw out the legitimate ballots of voters who voted in accordance with the laws in effect at the time,' Earls told the N&O, 'And these include military people who serve our country at great sacrifice to themselves overseas.' Only one Republican has announced a campaign to challenge Earls so far: Rep. Sarah Stevens, a nine-term state lawmaker and attorney from Surry County. 'On the Supreme Court I will be a conservative voice for justice and families,' Stevens said last month in her campaign announcement. 'My experience as a family law attorney and a state legislator has prepared me to be a voice for those who cannot advocate for themselves.' At her event on Friday, Earls railed against Stevens' record in the legislature, noting she voted for electoral maps that a court later ruled were gerrymandered and supported efforts to spent millions on private school vouchers. 'She's a career politician and there are real choices that voters have to make in November of 2026,' Earls said. While Republicans may have to wait for a primary to rally around a candidate, the party is already pushing against Earls. 'Justice Earls is responsible for years of N.C. Supreme Court decisions in which Democrats pushed radical left-wing politics under the guise of dubious legal theories,' Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the NC GOP said in a statement. 'The voters of North Carolina won't be fooled and will elect a new conservative Justice in 2026 who will follow the law.' Earls said she was proud of her record on the court, even if much of it has been served in the minority. As the only Black member of the Supreme Court, Earls said she was grateful to have 'been able to bring a measure of perspectives that helps ensure that our court is serving a broad base of the entire state.' While the Trump administration continues to target diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives nationwide, Earls has previously been outspoken about the need for diversity in the judicial system, prompting rebukes from Republicans and even an investigation. In 2023, Earls announced she was suing the Judicial Standards Commission, a body that handles ethics complaints against judges, after it threatened disciplinary action against her for critical comments she made about diversity in the state's judicial system. Earls later withdrew her lawsuit after the commission informed her it had dismissed the complaint. She said the specter of that investigation as well as Griffin's attempts to overturn the 2024 election add pressure to her campaign, but will not silence her. 'I will always endeavor to make sure that I speak in a way that never causes the courts to be called into disrepute,' Earls said Friday. 'But as a justice, I'm allowed to write dissents and I'm allowed to tell the public what those dissents say. '...I'm going to continue to make people aware of what matters to me and what my vision is of what our court system should provide for the people of the state. That seems, to me, fundamental to our democracy.' In the Spotlight designates ongoing topics of high interest that are driven by The News & Observer's focus on accountability reporting.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Justice Department files lawsuit against North Carolina Board of Elections for alleged inaccurate voter list
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against North Carolina and the State Board of Elections for allegedly failing to maintain an accurate voter list. The lawsuit alleges that the state violated the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) by using a State voter registration form that did not require a voter to provide identifying information such as a driver's license or the last four digits of a social security number. The lawsuit adds that voters remain on the registration roll without the required information. On March 25, President Trump signed an executive order entitled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, in order to ensure that elections are held in compliance with federal laws. This issue surfaced during the months-long fight over a North Carolina State Supreme Court seat, ultimately won by Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs. 'Accurate voter registration rolls are critical to ensure that elections in North Carolina are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud,' said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. 'The Department of Justice will not hesitate to file suit against jurisdictions that maintain inaccurate voter registration rolls in violation of federal voting laws.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NC high court denies Stein request, allows GOP takeover of state elections board
In a divided vote, the Republican-majority North Carolina Supreme Court late Friday denied Democratic Gov. Josh Stein's request to block new appointments to the State Board of Elections while Stein's lawsuit challenging the legality of the appointments proceeds. The ruling means that appointments to the board by State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican, are allowed to stand pending the lawsuit, which will likely take months to resolve. The Associated Press first reported the high court's ruling. Stein's lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of a law enacted by the GOP-dominated General Assembly last year that shifted authority for appointments to the elections board from Stein to Boliek. On April 30, the North Carolina Court of Appeals allowed the law to take effect, reversing the order of a lower court that ruled the law unconstitutional, The News & Observer reported at the time. On May 1, Boliek made appointments to the Elections Board that shifted the board from a 3-2 Democratic majority to a 3-2 GOP control. In its ruling Friday, the majority on the N.C. Supreme Court wrote that 'the Court of Appeals' ruling was not manifestly unsupported by reason or so arbitrary that it could not have been the result of a reasoned decision.' In her dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, wrote that the Supreme Court majority 'is rewriting precedent and creating an explanation for an unexplained Court of Appeals order in an effort to upend 125-years status quo for the North Carolina State Board of Elections while this case winds its way through the courts.' Friday's ruling also lets Boliek proceed with choosing chairpersons of the 100 county election boards beginning in late June.
Time Magazine
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
What North Carolina Can Teach us About the 2026 Elections
For over a decade, federal courts have steadily retreated from protecting voting rights. However, there is one line they appear unwilling to cross: intervening after an election is over to change the rules about which votes should count. The latest rejection of post-election subversion—or attempting to flip the result of an election after the fact—came in a ruling last week upholding the results of a North Carolina Supreme Court race. Outside of North Carolina, the ruling reverberates, sending a clear message to those who might try to subvert the 2026 elections: your efforts won't succeed. The election for a seat on North Carolina's high court was decided in November 2024 by a razor-thin margin of 734 votes in favor of incumbent Justice Allison Riggs. That outcome was confirmed by two recounts. Nonetheless, her opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin, challenged the results in state court in the weeks and months following Election Day in an extraordinary effort to throw out more than 60,000 votes after the election was over. Griffin didn't argue that the voters broke the rules in some way. Instead, he claimed that the rules that governed the election should be changed after the fact and that the ballots of voters that didn't comply with those rules should be tossed out. At first, Griffin's pitched battle in the state courts saw temporary success. Both the North Carolina appeals court and the North Carolina Supreme Court allowed some of the votes in question to be tossed out—a stark deviation from other courts who considered and dismissed such claims in the last few years. Had those decisions been allowed to stand, the ramifications would have been disastrous. Not only would they have set a terrible precedent in North Carolina's courts, but they would have also invited losing candidates to use the courts to selectively invalidate certain voters that don't skew in their favor. Rogue officials would have been able to re-interpret the rules post-election and test whether courts would stop them. It would have fundamentally undercut the will of the people and allowed politicians to pick their voters, not the other way around. Instead, when the case reached federal court, the court refused to be used as a tool for election subversion. A conservative federal judge, appointed by President Donald Trump, ordered that the election be certified in favor of Riggs, explaining that changing the rules after the election would violate voters' federal constitutional rights. The court preserved this most basic tenet of democracy. It cemented the principle that voters who follow the established rules at the time of an election must have their votes counted. For future elections, it closed the door on similarly fraught post-election contests. Prompted by this ruling, Griffin conceded the race, six months after the election. And this one court's ruling is not an outlier. After the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the outcome. Over and over, the courts tossed aside these attempts to change the outcome. In 2022 and 2024, we saw more sophisticated—but not more legitimate—attempts to subvert elections and to use the courts as a means toward that end. There were refusals to certify valid election results and even an extensive campaign of litigation in advance of the 2024 election that seemed designed to cue up disputes for after the election. Both federal and state courts shut down these efforts. To be clear, this does not indicate that we should count on federal courts to protect voting rights from the all-out assault being waged across the country. In fact, federal courts have recently made it harder and harder to ensure fair rules and equal access to the ballot before and during elections. Most notably, the Supreme Court hollowed out key portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant civil rights laws in our nation's history, in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. Since then, there have been many more bad decisions that, among other things, cut off any avenue for stopping partisan gerrymandering in federal court and made it exceedingly difficult to stop restrictive voting rules in an election year. Just this week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a disastrous ruling that, if it stands, would effectively end the ability of anyone other than the Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act in seven states across the middle of the country. The retreat of the federal judiciary from its long-time role as a reliable institutional protector of voting rights in the last few years has severed some much-needed trust in our elections. But at a moment when election deniers seed doubt about our elections, attempt to disrupt election processes and procedures, and use extreme tactics to try to overturn outcomes, this ruling in North Carolina draws an important line in the sand. Our democracy is far from perfect, but this line matters ahead of this year's and next year's elections. From federal courts, the message is clear: as the district court in North Carolina put it last week, you can't 'change the rules of the game after it had been played.'
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Justice Allison Riggs speaks at NC Democratic Party convention in Pitt County
WINTERVILLE, N.C. (WNCT) — Saturday, May 17, 2025, the North Carolina Democratic Party's Third Congressional District Convention took place at Pitt Community College. Attending the convention was NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who served as a guest speaker. The convention ran from 10 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. 'To thank the people in this room and in this space, in this larger region, who have done so much not only to get me over the finish line on Election Day, but to defend our win. I also want them to understand that I believe in a transparent and accountable judiciary,' Justice Riggs said. 'So, I'm not going to be a stranger in these parts, and Justice Anita Earls is up for election in 2026, and I'm going to work tirelessly to make sure we keep her in her seat and continue to elect judges who will put the Constitution and country over party and personal ambition.' Riggs won the Nov. 5, 2024, election by 734 votes. Her opponent, Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, attempted to throw out more than 65,000 ballots because of it. After a six-month court battle, a Trump-appointed judge ordered the Board of Elections to certify the race. Griffin ultimately conceded. 'She didn't give up. A lot of people would have. It seemed insurmountable, the amount of money that was spent in this state was tied to something inherently wrong,' Chair of the 3rd Congressional District of the North Carolina Democratic Party Wesley Boykin said. Riggs emphasized this fight was about more than a single election, it was about democracy. 'We can't just brush over this and pretend it didn't happen,' she said. 'We had a near-miss of a constitutional crisis. Over 68,000 eligible North Carolina voters who cast lawful ballots were at risk of losing their right to vote.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
