By Andy Jackson

North Carolina Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin’s lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections addresses a real problem that needs to be corrected. The solution does not include overturning the election that he lost, however.

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to hear Griffin v. North Carolina Board of Elections and issued a temporary stay preventing the State Board of Elections from certifying the 2024 Supreme Court race, in which Griffin has apparently lost to incumbent Allison Riggs by about 700 votes.

While Griffin’s protests to the SBE and subsequent lawsuit include complaints about several classes of ballots, the largest class by far (about 60,000 affected ballots) is for registrations that lack legally required identification.

Page 41 of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) states, “an application for voter registration for an election for federal office may not be accepted or processed by a state” unless the application includes either the applicant’s driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s Social Security number (hereafter called ‘HAVA numbers’).”

State law likewise requires county boards of elections to collect HAVA numbers for voter registrations and to make a “diligent effort to complete for the registration records any information requested on the form that the applicant does not complete.”

(Both laws provide alternatives for the tiny portion of citizens with neither number.)

Using HAVA numbers in voter-registration records helps secure our state’s voter rolls. It allows election officials to compare those rolls against other data sources to confirm that registrants are who they claim they are or are still eligible to vote in North Carolina. The voter-registration numbers provided to voters by the North Carolina State Board of Elections cannot be matched against other records.

Despite federal and state laws requiring HAVA numbers for voter registration records, the SBE treated them as optional for two decades. The voter registration applications did not mark them as required. Second, they did not instruct county boards of elections to make a “diligent effort” to complete the registration records with missing HAVA numbers.

The SBE was finally forced to address the problem following a series of citizen complaints. They agreed to comply with state law only partially by changing the voter-registration form to indicate that applicants must submit one of the HAVA numbers. Under the advice of SBE General Counsel Paul Cox, however, the board decided not to require county elections boards to make any effort, let alone a “diligent effort,” to obtain the missing HAVA numbers for roughly 225,000 registrations.

So, what is to be done now?

First, the SBE should be required to direct county boards of elections to make a “diligent effort” to collect HAVA numbers for registrations that are missing them.

The board should also request the resignation of SBE executive director Karen Brinson Bell and general counsel Paul Cox over their persistent mismanagement of the HAVA numbers problem and Cox’s advice to the board not to correct the problem with current registrations. If the board does not, the new board majority to be appointed under state Auditor Dave Boliek (assuming it survives its own lawsuit) should remove them.

Second, the ballots from the affected registrants should be accepted, and, depending on what happens with the rest of Griffin’s complaints, Riggs should be certified as the election winner. As North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Richard Dietz noted in dissent to the state Supreme Court’s vote decision to accept Griffin’s petition to the court, it amounts to “post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process.”

While missing HAVA numbers can make it easier to hide fraudulent registrations, they are not proof that individual registrations are fraudulent. Likewise, the Griffin campaign has not shown that the election outcome would have been any different if the registrations with missing HAVA numbers had been corrected before the election. Voters who did nothing wrong — because the registration form did not indicate that the HAVA numbers were required — should not be punished for election officials’ maladministration.

There is a time to fix the HAVA numbers problem raised in Griffin’s complaint, but during election certification is not that time. The time to correct election regulations is before the next election. The time for certifying the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court race is now.

Andy Jackson is the director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation. This column appeared in The Carolina Journal.