Is North Carolina the canary in the coal mine for American democracy?

One man can save democracy for future generations.

By Mike Sacks and Evan Vorpahl

With the help of wealthy out-of-state special interest groups, North Carolina’s Republican-dominated courts are trying to steal a state Supreme Court seat by throwing out as many as 65,000 North Carolinians’ lawfully cast votes.

Last November, North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs defeated her Republican challenger, Judge Jefferson Griffin, by 734 votes. Riggs’s win has been confirmed by two recounts and an audit.

Only after he lost the election did Griffin claim that the rules these voters followed in registering to vote were illegal. But now, two Republican judges on North Carolina’s Court of Appeals are helping Griffin try to overturn Riggs’s win by disenfranchising tens of thousands of North Carolinians—including members of the U.S. military serving overseas. On Friday, in a 2-1 party-line decision, Judges John Tyson and Fred Gore ordered the State Board of Elections to recount votes, giving voters whose ballots are threatened only 15 days to cure their ballots—and throwing out some voters’ ballots entirely.

In a scathing dissent, Judge Toby Hampson noted that Griffin had not “identif[ied] a single voter…who was, in fact, ineligible to vote in the 2024 General Election under the statutes, rules, and regulations in place in November 2024.” Hampson wrote that “changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution,” and described Tyson’s and Gore’s decision as an “act of mass disenfranchisement.”

The North Carolina Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has already endorsed the Republican-controlled legislature’s extreme partisan gerrymanders, which proved decisive in securing the razor-thin, trifecta-sealing Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Last December, just hours after the state’s Election Board rejected Griffin’s challenge, the legislature’s Republican supermajority passed veto-proof legislation to strip the governor—a Democrat—of the century-old power to choose Election Board members and to deprive the state’s attorney general—also a Democrat—from participating in any legal challenges to the legislature’s actions.

The future of representative democracy in North Carolina depends on rebalancing the composition of the state Supreme Court so it can again bar extreme partisan gerrymandering. The soonest that can happen is in 2028, when additional seats are up—and the chances of that happening all but disappear if Riggs’s victory is overturned to install Griffin and a 6-1 conservative majority.

It’s not a stretch to say that if this attempted judicial coup succeeds, it could be the death knell of America’s unbroken tradition of free and fair elections, creating a proof of concept for MAGA election-theft efforts in the 2026 midterms.

As Riggs told Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias on Friday after the decision: “This does not just affect North Carolina….This is like dropping a match in a really dry forest. And if we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

Authoritarian Funding Networks Are Systematically Assaulting Free and Fair Elections

Griffin is following President Donald Trump’s election-theft playbook and has brought on Trump’s team to call the plays, quarterbacked by notorious “Stop the Steal” lawyer Cleta Mitchell. As ProPublica reported, Griffin’s strategy “was originated and championed by far-right activists working with a conservative organization that was secretly preparing to contest election results if Trump had lost the 2024 election.”

Working with Mitchell’s Project 2025-affiliated “Election Integrity Network” (EIN), North Carolina GOP operatives developed a plan to “arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest,” aiming to throw out the ballots of voters whose registration files were missing a driver's license number or Social Security information, as ProPublica reported. In October, claiming without evidence that the state’s voter lists were “corrupted,” EIN’s North Carolina affiliate President Jim Womack instructed over 1,800 “election protection” volunteers to comb through the state’s voter rolls to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as “suspicious voters.”

EIN sits at the center of a tangled knot of opaquely funded entities working to erase the votes of North Carolina citizens. A group calling itself Citizens for a Better NC received $500,000 from the richest man in Pennsylvania, billionaire options trader Jeff Yass, who has long tried to capture the courts in that state. Another group, the “Voter Education Network,” spent over $1.3 million on mailers and get-out-the-vote efforts for Republicans, buoying Griffin. VEN was funded entirely by Citizens for a Better NC.

Yet another group, “Stop Liberal Judges,” spent over $750,000 backing Griffin; it was heavily funded by Citizens for a Better NC, which was funded by the Good Government Coalition (GGC), which was funded by the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC).

Not dizzy yet? Keep spinning.

In recent years, RSLC’s biggest funders have been groups tied to the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. Leo, who funds many of the groups behind Project 2025, famously financed and directed the right-wing takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was Leo’s Supreme Court partisan majority that immunized anti-democratic gerrymanders like North Carolina’s from constitutional challenges in federal court.

Leo, who last fall announced plans to leverage his billion-dollar trust to “weaponize conservative ideas” and “crush liberal dominance,” also left his financial fingerprints all over the legal filings in Griffin’s challenge. Two Leo-tied groups—calling themselves the “Honest Elections Project” (HEP) and “Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections” (RITE), despite peddling discredited voter fraud claims—both filed amicus briefs backing Griffin. RITE’s president, Derek Lyons, previously worked for the “Judicial Education Project” (JEP), a Leo-tied “charitable” 501(c)(3) arm. JEP disclosed about $145 million in revenue in its latest tax filing, most of which it funneled to other right-wing nonprofits and dark-money funding vehicles. Also operating under a brand called “The 85 Fund,” JEP also does business under a host of “fictitious names,” including HEP. Notably, HEP, RITE, and NCEIT are all members of the “Only Citizens Vote Coalition," a network of election deniers created by Mitchell.

Once you stop seeing double, a clear picture emerges: The multibillion-dollar authoritarian network behind Project 2025 is working to cement control of North Carolina’s courts to lock in unconstitutionally gerrymandered maps. They are defying the will of the people to steal an election, rig the state Supreme Court, and cement an illegitimate grip on power.

Where Do Things Stand Now?

As if this weren’t bad enough, all signs indicate that MAGA justices and judges in North Carolina’s courts are in on the scheme. Riggs and the state board of elections have since won a temporary stay of Friday’s decision from the North Carolina state supreme Supreme Court, but that move merely preserves the status quo pending an appeal before a court where three Republicans have already signaled their support for Griffin (with Riggs recused, the remaining three justices—two Republicans and one Democrat—have indicated they’d side with Riggs).

If the state Supreme Court had accepted Griffin’s previous request to skip the Republican-dominated court of appeals, the deadlock would have upheld Griffin’s loss before the pro-democracy Election Board, allowing Riggs to retain her rightfully elected seat. Now that the Republican judges on the North Carolina Court of Appeals have ruled in Griffin’s favor, however, a deadlock at the state Supreme Court would effectively constitute a ruling for the loser Griffin.

Riggs and the Board of Elections will likely return to federal court for relief. In January, a Trump-appointed federal district judge rejected Riggs’s and the Election Board’s request to remove Griffin’s state court case to federal court, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit left the federal courthouse doors open to Riggs and the board, should Griffin win a final decision from the state court system.

If the case ends up back before the Fourth Circuit, the federal appeals court can allow the board to certify Riggs’s election. Even so, the Fourth Circuit might not have the last word: whoever loses before the federal appeals court will almost certainly seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose own MAGA justices owe their power to Leo, Griffin’s chief financial backer.

Griffin, for his part, need not be part of this putsch. He can end this all now. If he cares about the people of North Carolina, he must stop trying to disenfranchise them for simply following the rules and concede the race to Riggs.

What You Can Do

• Speak up. Amid the chaos of the national news cycle, it’s critical that the sweeping, ominous implications of this case not get lost in the shuffle. Share resources on what’s happening in North Carolina with your friends, family, and networks, and demand that Griffin stop trying to silence North Carolinians.

• If you’re a North Carolina voter, check whether you are on the list of voters whose ballot is under threat.

  • If so, contact your county Board of Elections and ask how you can fix any issue with the record.

  • If you have questions or need help, call the Southern Coalition for Social Justice at 888-OUR-VOTE to speak to a trained nonpartisan election protection team. If you want to speak directly to a non-partisan voting rights attorney, email Jeff Loperfido, SCSJ’s chief counsel of voting rights, at jeffloperfido@scsj.org.

• Support organizations rallying the charge in North Carolina against Griffin and the dark-money groups behind him, including Common Cause North Carolina and Put North Carolina First.

Mike Sacks is a senior adviser at Court Accountability Action. Evan Vorpahl is director of the State Courts Project at Court Accountability’s Research Arm, True North Research.

For more in-depth research and analysis from Court Accountability Action and True North, subscribe to Tilted Scales on Substack.

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