Musings about North Carolina's contested Supreme Court election

With data on which registered voters don't have ID on file in NC and Florida

After the initial vote following the November 5, 2024 election, machine recount, and a partial hand recount, incumbent NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs has been declared the winner by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), winning by 734 votes.

GOP candidate, Judge Jefferson Griffin, though, still is holding out for a legal opinion to strike some 60k ballots that he claims should be tossed out. Griffin, a Republican, claims that these voters should be disqualified from the rolls because many of them did not provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered to vote and others, overseas and military voters, failed to provide a photo ID with their ballots. Presumably, if Griffin’s lawsuit to disenfranchise these registered voters who cast valid ballots in the Supreme Court contest is successful, these voters should also have their votes invalidated in every other contest on the ballot.

It is quite possible that Griffin’s legal challenge may reach the NC State Supreme Court on which Democrat Justice Riggs (a Florida Gator, incidentally) sits and where Republicans hold a 5-to-2 majority.

NC voter file data is arguably the most comprehensive, most accessible, and most affordable (it’s free!) of any state in the country. The NCSBE makes the statewide voter file available here for download, and the registrar of voters is updated every week. I downloaded a copy this morning to take another gander at it. I’ve written several journal articles on election administration and voting rights that have utilized the NC statewide voter file, so I’m quite familiar with it. But I couldn’t recall whether the datafile provides a field for whether a registered voter provided a NC driver’s license (or state ID) or a SSN when they registered to vote, which is required (but has not been enforced until recently) in NC .

It turns out that the NC statewide voter file does have a field for whether a registered voter has a driver’s license on file, but it does not include a field whether a SSN is on file, so we’re unable to assess which voters (Republicans, Democrats, Unaffiliateds, or those registered with minor parties) in the state may be more or less likely to be affected if the NC Supreme Court were to rule in Griffin’s favor.