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.