An election loser wants to win by disqualifying thousands of voters. How can you even find their ballots?

Most of the votes challenged by Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin weren't flagged when they were cast. So how would you actually match up the ballot with the voter? Aren't votes secret?

“Counting the vote, on November 7th, at ‘Elephant Johnnie's” (From a sketch by S.W. Bennett via Library of Congress)

UPDATE (4/16/25): SO MANY THINGS have happened in the short time since this story was published. As of this moment, many of the votes that were once in dispute will count after all, and many of the still-contested votes might also count as well. Bryan Anderson has a detailed summation of what’s going on over at his newsletter, but in short, if things stand as they do today, it looks like Allison Riggs would still win her race.

Wrongly labeled 'never residents' must have votes counted, state elections officials conclude

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There’s a guy down the road from me named Travis Then who sold me his old ice hockey goalie gear. He also sharpens skates. Back in January, I asked him if I could drop off a pair of Bauers at his house. I also asked him if he knew that his name was on a list of voters who were in danger of having their ballots thrown out.

First off, Travis told me to drop off my skates anytime. “This other thing -- complete surprise,” he texted me. “I had no idea my vote was being contested! Going to reach out to the [Board of Elections] and figure out what I need to do to fix this.”

So how did I know that Travis’s ballot was in danger? I’d looked up some people in my town on a list of voters whose ballots were challenged by a supreme court candidate. Travis’s was the only name I recognized. “Thank you so much for sharing,” he texted me. “I'd have never known!!”

Election Day was more than five months ago, and we still, technically, do not have a winner in a race for the North Carolina Supreme Court. If you’ve been following the case, you may know that Allison Riggs, a Democrat, won her race by a razor-thin margin of 734 votes. You may also know that her Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin, is challenging the bona fides of more than 65,000 voters, saying that they didn’t have all of the necessary information in the voter registration system, and their votes shouldn’t count. The case has bopped around the state and federal court system for a very long time, and it’s now the only uncalled statewide race left in the entire country.

The bulk of the ballots being challenged, about 60,000 of them, were missing information in their voter registration files, like their driver’s license number or the last four numbers of their social security number. Another 5,500 or so were mail-in absentee ballots from military or overseas voters who weren’t asked to show voter ID. Another 267 overseas voters being challenged never lived in North Carolina. Most of them are the now-adult children of voters who had North Carolina residency before they moved overseas.

The latest here is that the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that about 200 votes should be totally thrown out, and the rest of the voters being challenged should have 15 business days to fix whatever issue that Griffin has flagged. Riggs has already appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has put everything on hold for now. But because she lost at the Court of Appeals, Riggs would have to win her case outright, since a 3-3 tie would go to Griffin (Riggs, who currently sits on the supreme court, has recused herself).

Jefferson Griffin and Allison Riggs.

So let’s say Griffin prevails, and a big chunk of those 65,000 votes has to be thrown out. How do they … do that? “One thing that's really unclear to me in the North Carolina Supreme Court litigation is HOW any ‘illegally cast’ votes would be subtracted from anyone's total,” Michigan State law professor Quinn Yeargain wrote on Bluesky. “It’s stunning that this hasn't been discussed in the filings or media coverage. The ballots weren't (as far as I can tell) isolated!” Yeah man! Isn’t your ballot supposed to be secret? How can they tell which one is yours?

First off, ballots weren’t always secret. Confidential voting debuted in Australia in the 1850s. By the 1890s, several states had adopted secret ballots. Not North Carolina, though! Back in the day, political parties were the one who printed ballots, which only had their own candidates on them. To vote, you took the ballot representing the person you wanted, then dropped it into a box in full view of poll workers, political party observers, and anyone else who was hanging around. Did this lead to vote buying and intimidation? Why, yes it did! It did, however, make it easier for the illiterate to vote. So there’s that.

The practice ended in 1929, thanks to a new law championed by Governor O. Max Gardner. After that, the political party-printed ballot disappeared in North Carolina. Today, there are all sorts of electioneering rules that prevent people from looking over your shoulder in the booth, stop you from sharing a shot of your votes on social media, and keep candidates and their paraphernalia a certain distance away from the polls.

In order to understand how anyone could find YOUR secret ballot, you have to know what Griffin is challenging, and what he’s not.

You may have have heard of provisional votes. Let’s say you show up at the polls, but you forgot your photo ID. You can still vote, but that vote is set aside until you come back at a later time and fix the problem. But! None of these votes were provisional. In fact, most of the voters on the list had no idea that there was any problem at all when they cast a ballot on Election Day. “I voted in person early -- same polling station I've used for the last 8+ years, my assigned local precinct,” Travis told me. “No issues to my knowledge, precinct was near empty when we voted.”

The clue here is in Travis’s method of voting. “The challenged voters are either in-person early voters or absentee voters,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections told me. “Under state law, ballots cast by these voters must be retrievable.” There are a lot of reasons for this. Let’s say you vote early, and then show up and vote again on Election Day. The local board of elections discovers this. Your early vote wouldn’t count, so there has to be a way to go back and pull your early vote out. Same thing if you cast a vote as a convicted felon, or if you were to die in between early voting and Election Day. (If this happened to you, I’m so sorry, and thank you for reading the Rabbit Hole from beyond the grave.)

How are those votes retrievable? Each early and absentee vote has a confidential handwritten number on it, says Gerry Cohen, a member of the Wake County Board of Elections (and a man who generally knows everything about everything when it comes to elections and state government procedure). So if a vote is successfully challenged, someone with the board of elections has to look up that person’s number, go find the ballot with that number on it, pull it out, check the vote in the state supreme court race, and then subtract that vote from the total. Is that an easy process? My God no. “If a court ordered Wake to remove 500 ballots, staff would pull the confidential application numbers of those voters then with that list, search through well over 1,000 boxes each with 500 ballots—that are not in any numerical order—and find 500 out of 500,000 in the boxes,” says Cohen. I told him that it seemed like it would take a long time to do that. “How much time do you have?” Cohen replied.

Here’s a picture of Gerry Cohen looking VERY closely at a ballot, which I am using here because it is both illustrative and funny (via Gerry’s Twitter page)

So, what about people who voted on Election Day itself? “Ballots cast on Election Day are not retrievable, and therefore could not be removed from the count,” says Gannon. There are no numbers on those votes, so there’s no way to go back and find them. So how would you remove the votes of Election Day voters whose registration information is incomplete? Ha! Trick question! Griffin isn’t going after those voters! “There are a lot of folks who voted on Election Day but have allegedly incomplete voter [registration information] on file, but he is not challenging them,” says Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “His proposed remedy is to take out the challenged ballots and re-total them—impossible for Election Day.” If he were to challenge them and win, the only way to fix them may be to hold a new election? Maybe? Big elections have been thrown out in North Carolina before, but not for this reason. In fact, nobody’s ever used this reason to try and disqualify voters before.

This lawsuit, then, may strike you as less of an exercise to protect the integrity of the voting process, and more of—I don’t know—a nitpicky way to surgically remove enough votes to give you a win. Again, this process only goes after early and absentee votes. Early votes tend to skew Democratic. And while Griffin Is challenging early votes statewide, he’s only challenging absentee votes in four counties: Forsyth, Durham, Buncombe, and Guilford. Say, those counties also tend to vote Democratic! He’s not challenging Election Day votes, which are usually more Republican. Also, if there were a new election today, polling shows that the electorate would likely be more Democratic than it was in early November. And, last thing, if people are disqualified, they’d only be disqualified for this race! Their votes for everything else will count.

The state Board of Elections has maintained all along that any errors are honest mistakes (Some may be transcription errors, and other information wasn’t collected years ago because the law said it didn’t need to be), or that many of the things Griffin claims are illegal are clearly legal (For example: The law doesn’t require overseas voters to show ID when they vote, although the Court of Appeals ruled that North Carolina’s voter ID amendment supersedes that). Even so, many of these voters have never had a problem with voting until now, and no other candidate is challenging them. And in the end, it’s possible that many of the votes will not be thrown out as long as the voters in question can fix their problems (The Court of Appeals wants to give them three weeks). But the practical effect might be that it gives losing candidates in close races a way to win. How? By disenfranchising a lot of voters who’d followed all of the rules with extra burdens. To win, Griffin doesn’t need all 65,000 votes to change. He just needs a few hundred people who aren’t paying attention or are hard to reach.

In the meantime, any voters on this list (created by the fine folks at Triangle Blog Blog) can go ahead and update their voter registration information while they wait to see what happens. And the North Carolina Board of Elections keeps updating this page to tell affected voters what they should be doing at this point. Travis himself is waiting to see what to do. The Guilford County Board of Elections told him he’s free to update his registration. “As of today, your vote has been counted,” they told him via email. “If the courts make decisions otherwise, you will be contacted.”