He was born in North Carolina. Republicans say he’s a ‘never resident’ and want to throw out his vote
By Tierney Sneed and Dianne Gallagher, CNN
(CNN) — Nearly six months after he voted in the 2024 election, North Carolinian Josiah Young still isn’t sure if his ballot will be counted in a high-stakes race for a state Supreme Court seat.
Born and raised in western North Carolina, the 20-year-old college student studied abroad in Spain last semester, so he cast his ballot using an online portal for military and overseas voters. It was his first major general election, and, as far as he knew, everything went well.
But in January, one of his father’s colleagues alerted Young that his vote in the key race was at risk of being thrown out in a still-ongoing GOP effort to reverse the unofficial results, which showed the Democratic incumbent had defeated her Republican challenger.
Young is one of thousands of overseas voters whose ballots are in limbo due to an unprecedented election challenge launched by Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican who is seeking to unseat Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs and who won 734 votes fewer than she did after two recounts of the race last year.
Young was identified as a so-called “Never Resident” by Griffin, who is contesting the eligibility of overseas voters who have never lived in North Carolina but, under state law, are allowed to vote there because of parental ties to the state. Regardless of the merits of Griffin’s arguments, Young’s presence on the list appears to be an error that could lead to his disenfranchisement.
When filling out the federal form overseas Americans can use to register to vote and request an absentee ballot, he told CNN it is possible he mistakenly checked a box which states, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.” Records obtained by CNN show Young did, in fact, check the box on the form, which is known as the Federal Post Card Application. There is other registration data which proves that his selection of that box was incorrect. In the weeks after he submitted the form, multiple state courts affirmed a North Carolina law allowing overseas Americans who never lived in the state to still vote there if a parent had resided there.
“I’ve never been outside the country for more than four months at a time. I had always lived in Jackson County,” Young said, telling CNN that just last year, he graduated from high school and obtained an Associate’s Degree from the local community college. State voter records show Young has been a registered North Carolina voter since 2023 and has voted in person twice – a municipal and primary election – before casting his absentee ballot from Spain. Young told CNN he was excited to cast a “major election ballot” for the first time and even checked with the county board to make sure it had been received.
“I don’t know whose responsibility it is exactly but I should have been contacted by someone, whether that’s the state board or the state Supreme Court. I definitely think we should have been notified by somebody, somehow and sooner,” said Young.
Election officials and voting rights advocates suspect Young is not the only North Carolinian who incorrectly checked the box when registering to vote from abroad, landing them on Griffin’s challenge list. But Griffin is pushing back in court against efforts by the North Carolina Board of Elections to further vet whether voters inaccurately identified themselves as “Never Residents.”
“It appears that some voters may have selected the check box in error when completing the [Federal Post Card Application] and as a result show up in the data,” state election board spokesman Patrick Gannon told CNN.
After state courts said that the roughly 260 “Never Resident” votes targeted by Griffin should be tossed out, the legal fight over those ballots and others challenged by Griffin is now in the federal judiciary, where it’s an example of Republicans exploiting a playbook that arose out of President Donald Trump’s false claims of mass fraud in the 2020 election. In his lawsuit, Griffin has not put forward any claims of voter fraud, but instead is seizing on technicalities and apparent clerical errors to reverse the unofficial results
Resolving the dispute could take many months – with the expectation that the US Supreme Court will ultimately be asked to weigh in. Even if Griffin was to prevail in that round of the legal fight, it’s unclear it would be enough for him to overcome Riggs’ lead, as courts have significantly narrowed the pool of ballots in dispute over the course of the litigation. Still, voter advocates worry that the litigation has created a roadmap for losing candidates to launch aggressive and legally dubious campaigns to change the results, eroding Americans’ confidence in the democratic process.
“It’s disappointing – and surprising, of course. I can imagine for a lot of first-time voters it would be pretty, pretty demoralizing for the democratic process to play out this way,” Young told CNN. “I wasn’t exactly shocked at what had occurred, in the grand scheme of things, with them trying to fish for these ballots- but I was definitely shocked that my ballot was one of them.”
Fight now hinges on the US Constitution
The North Carolina State Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the ballots of the supposed “Never Residents” should be thrown out – without an opportunity for those voters to attempt to prove they were wrongly included on the list. The order also put in jeopardy the ballots of at least 1,409 overseas voters (Griffin argues it applies to a larger pool of 5,509 voters) who submitted ballots without showing photo ID – though the state Supreme Court said those voters should be allowed to fix the issue by providing ID through a yet-to-determined “curing process.”
With Riggs recusing, the vote was 4-2, with one of the court’s five Republican justices joining its remaining Democrat in dissenting.
A 2011 state law extended voter eligibility to overseas citizens who had not ever lived in North Carolina, but who had a parent who was a resident – often the adult children of expats or military members who served extended periods abroad. The law, passed with bipartisan support, had been implemented since the 2012 election without controversy until a GOP lawsuit challenging it before the 2024 election. That pre-election lawsuit was unsuccessful, but Republican-leaning state courts have since accepted Griffin’s arguments that a provision in the North Carolina Constitution requiring residency to vote required the ballots’ rejection.
The other category of ballots are in dispute because of regulations passed by the State Election Board that exempted those voters from North Carolina’s photo ID requirement – an exemption that Republicans did not raise issue with at the time, even as they weighed in on other aspects of the regulations.
Now Riggs and others are pointing to the US Constitution’s Due Process and Equal Protection clauses in calling on federal courts to reverse the state court’s order and allow all the ballots to count.
Riggs, the State Board and voting rights advocates are arguing to federal courts that the state court orders are unconstitutionally changing the rules after the fact, as voters should not be disenfranchised for following the rules as they were set on Election Day.
“If these election protests are at all successful in discounting votes, it means that voters cannot leave the voting booth with confidence that their vote is going to be counted, even if they follow all the rules at that time,” said Hilary Harris Klein, a senior counsel for voting rights for the civil right organization the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. (Before becoming a judge, Riggs was a leader of the group).
Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the North Carolina GOP, pushed back: “This isn’t about changing the rules after the election, it’s about having the State Board of Elections follow what the law says.”
Griffin brought his protest regarding the overseas photo ID exemption – and to a much larger bucket of voters whose ballots the state Supreme Court determined should be counted – in just a handful of counties. Mercer said the limited nature of those challenges was because only those counties had the relevant data available by deadlines set by election protest laws.
But those counties also lean Democratic, and Griffin’s opponents argue that it’s an Equal Protection Clause violation, regardless.
“You can’t apply one set of rules in six counties and another set of rules in 94 counties,” said Anne Tindall, special counsel for Protect Democracy, which is representing overseas voters who are also challenging the state court orders in federal court.
A long legal road still ahead
Even after five months of fighting in court over the election results, it may be several more until the state Supreme Court race is resolved.
A US District Judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina could rule at any time on Riggs’ constitutional claims, having received a final round of briefing Monday. Judge Richard Myers, a Trump appointee, could also schedule oral arguments.
His decision will almost certainly be appealed to the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and likely, then, the US Supreme Court.
In the meantime, another round of litigation is continuing in state courts about the scope of its orders as applied to the curing requirement for overseas voters who did not provide photo ID. The state board, which has a Democratic majority, is arguing the order applies to just the 1,409 relevant voters in Guilford County, while Griffin claims that it covers six counties, which would require 5,509 total overseas voters fix their ballots. North Carolina election experts believe that, without the broader interpretation of the order, there likely wouldn’t be enough contested votes to overturn Riggs’ lead.
The requirement that those overseas voters provide their photo ID could cause them to be wrongly disenfranchised, voter advocates are arguing in court. Election officials will need to track down the affected voters – which include members of the military and their families – who may no longer be at the location where they registered. And those voters may face logistical difficulties in obtaining and submitting their photo ID.
While state courts have at least given those voters the opportunity to “cure” their ballots, no such guarantee was given to those tagged as “Never Residents,” as more evidence emerges that at least some of those voters identified themselves that way by mistake.
An analysis of state data by Southern Coalition for Social Justice found that 17 other voters on Griffin’s “Never Resident” challenge list had previously voted in person in North Carolina and that 26 voters on the list have a North Carolina driver’s license number in their voter registration file.
Mercer, the GOP spokesperson, blamed the discrepancies on how “sloppy” the state board has been in administering the elections – a sloppiness Republicans contend is the root of the current fight.
Klein thinks that, like Young, other North Carolinians abroad may have inadvertently checked the box indicating themselves as non-residents on the federal overseas voter registration form, or that election officials made a mistake when entering voters into the system.
“But this underscores how unfair changing the rules after the fact is. Voters had no idea if they checked that box that it would later, retroactively disqualify them,” she said.
She said the effort by Griffin to disqualify them is the “quintessential example of a candidate trying to pick their voters after the fact, rather than voters picking the winning candidate – which is how our elections are supposed to work.”
The-CNN-Wire
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