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A Republican court candidate in North Carolina wants to toss out thousands of votes
Standing in front of the North Carolina Supreme Court in Raleigh on Jan. 14, Ted Corcoran reads a list of over 60,000 people who cast ballots in the November 2024 election but whose votes have been challenged by Republican court candidate Jefferson Griffin in his extremely close race with Democratic Justice Allison Riggs.
Chris Seward/AP
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Chris Seward/AP
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Tory Grimm-Oropesa moved to Charlotte from northern California in 2022. She then voted in two elections without incident. But after voting in November of last year, she received an unusual piece of mail.
“I got a postcard in the mail with a QR code on it that said my ballot was being challenged,” she said.
That postcard was from the campaign of Republican Jefferson Griffin, in a contest for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. After two recounts in the swing state, Griffin is trailing Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs by a miniscule 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast.
Griffin hasn’t pointed to any case of voter fraud, but he is contesting Grimm-Oropesa’s vote — along with roughly 65,000 others.
His challenge means that a bitter fight over a state high court seat is still working its way through the courts, more than 80 days after Election Day.
The next step comes Monday, when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments, before ultimately deciding whether the case should be decided in federal court or in state court.

Meanwhile, Grimm-Oropesa is upset.
“It’s not a matter of I did something wrong or I’m trying to cheat in voting,” she said. “I voted in three different elections now, perfectly fine, never had an issue. So I don’t understand why this one and just this one result should be thrown out.”
3 buckets of challenged ballots
Riggs was appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2023 by then-Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. She has recused herself from this case, and possibly deciding her own election.
But she has publicly criticized Griffin’s challenge. In a recent statement, Riggs said Griffin was wasting taxpayer dollars in “a baseless attempt to overturn his electoral loss.”
Griffin has said he can’t comment on his legal effort.
The list of challenged voters includes some elected officials. It also includes Riggs’ parents. The contested ballots are in three buckets:
- A little more than 60,000 of them are due to voters having incomplete registrations. At one point, North Carolina’s voter registration forms didn’t explicitly say that a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number were needed. More than 200,000 voters statewide are believed to have missing information.
- Griffin is also challenging a small group of overseas voters who haven’t lived in North Carolina.
- And then roughly 5,500 of the challenged ballots are also from overseas. Those voters didn’t show a copy of their photo ID when voting, and Griffin has argued they should be thrown out. These challenged ballots come from just four Democratic-leaning counties in the state.
The state Board of Elections had approved rules that didn’t require photo ID for overseas ballots. Those rules were then unanimously approved in March by the North Carolina Rules Review Commission, whose 10 members were selected by the Republican leaders of the state House and Senate.
And both Republicans and Democrats on the state Board of Elections in December rejected Griffin’s push to disqualify those voters.
Certification of the election has been blocked
GOP political consultant Paul Shumaker, who advised Griffin’s campaign, said it’s reasonable for a court to review the decisions made by the elections board and other agencies — even if they were bipartisan.
“Why are we going to have an appointed board be the final determination of the interpretation of our laws? Do we really want that?” he said. “We have judicial review of the legislative process. [What] about judicial [review] of the administrative process and how our elections are handled?”
The North Carolina Supreme Court has blocked certification of the election. But last week it said the challenge should first be heard in lower state courts, a setback for Griffin.
However Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, appeared to support Griffin’s challenge. He also cast doubt over the entire election process.
In the ruling, he said Riggs’ ability to erase Griffin’s lead of 10,000 votes on election night was a “highly unusual course of events.” (It’s common in elections for one candidate to appear to be leading and then fall behind as all results are tallied.)

Newby wrote: “[T]his case is not about deciding the outcome of an election. It is about preserving the public’s trust and confidence in our elections through the rule of law.”
The state Board of Elections, which has a Democratic majority, has said the post-Election Day counting of mail ballots and provisional ballots followed state law.
Some Republicans are uneasy with Griffin’s challenge
As the dispute has dragged on, some Republicans say Griffin has gone too far.
Republican state Supreme Court Justice Richard Dietz wrote earlier this month that it would invite “incredible mischief” to have post-election litigation that “seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules” and “remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules.”
Andrew Dunn, the communications director on an unsuccessful GOP campaign for governor four years ago, said the Democratic Party’s talk about threats to democracy are, in his view, usually overblown.
“However this case to me is different,” he said. “This case is about complaining about the results of an election and trying to go back and retroactively disqualify voters who cast ballots in good faith.”
Depending on court rulings, the state supreme court race could be re-tabulated — or a new election could be ordered.
Meanwhile, voters like Annie Rickenbaugh of Charlotte wonder if their challenged ballots will still count.
“I’m a regular person trying to pay my rent,” she said. “I don’t want to have to deal with this.”
She said she went to the county board of elections to re-register in the hopes her ballot is never challenged again.
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Video: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
new video loaded: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
transcript
transcript
At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
Students remained locked in their dorms and classrooms as the police searched for the shooter, who was described as a man wearing black. At least two people are dead, and eight are in critical condition.
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At 4:00 in the afternoon, we received a call. 4:05 was when the initial call came in to Brown University of a report of an active shooter. I can confirm that there are two individuals who have died this afternoon, and there are another eight in critical status. We do not have a shooter in custody at this time. There is a shelter in place in effect for the greater Brown University area. If you live on or near Brown’s campus, we are encouraging you to stay home and stay inside. This is a sad state of our country right now where you have to plan for these things. And hopefully the community takes some comfort to know that their Providence leadership has planned for this occurrence, including very recently.
By McKinnon de Kuyper
December 13, 2025
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Multiple people shot near Brown University, police say
In this image from video, law enforcement officials gather outside the Brown University campus in Providence, R.I., on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025.
Kimberlee Kruesi/AP
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Multiple people have been shot near Brown University in Providence, R.I., on Saturday, police said.
The Providence Police Department said it is actively investigating the situation and is encouraging the public to shelter in place until further notice.
There is no suspect in custody, the university said on X, adding that it’s coordinating with multiple law enforcement agencies to search for a suspect.
The university issued an alert Saturday afternoon that the shooter was spotted near the Barus and Holley building, which houses the School of Engineering and Physics Department.
“Continue to shelter in place. Remain away from Barus & Holley area. Police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s). Brown coordinating with multiple law enforcement agencies on site,” the university said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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What to know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from immigration custody
BALTIMORE — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, was released from immigration detention on Thursday, and a judge has temporarily blocked any further efforts to detain him.
Abrego Garcia currently can’t be deported to his home country of El Salvador thanks to a 2019 immigration court order that found he had a “well founded fear” of danger there. However, the Trump administration has said he cannot stay in the U.S. Over the past few months, government officials have said they would deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia.
Abrego Garcia is fighting his deportation in federal court in Maryland, where his attorneys claim the administration is manipulating the immigration system to punish him for successfully challenging his earlier deportation.
Here’s what to know about the latest developments in the case:
Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a U.S. citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country.
While he was allowed to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, despite the earlier court ruling.
When Abrego Garcia was deported in March, he was held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.
The Trump administration initially fought efforts to bring him back to the U.S. but eventually complied after the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. He returned to the U.S. in June, only to face an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia was held in a Tennessee jail for more than two months before he was released on Friday, Aug. 22, to await trial in Maryland under home detention.
His freedom lasted a weekend. On the following Monday, he reported to the Baltimore immigration office for a check-in and was immediately taken into immigration custody. Officials announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, but they were blocked by an order from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland.
On Thursday, after months of legal filings and hearings, Xinis ruled that Abrego Garcia should be released immediately. Her ruling hinged on what was likely a procedural error by the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019.
Normally, in a case like this, an immigration judge will first issue an order of removal. Then the judge will essentially freeze that order by issuing a “withholding of removal” order, according to Memphis immigration attorney Andrew Rankin.
In Abrego Garcia’s case, the judge granted withholding of removal to El Salvador because he found Abrego Garcia’s life could be in danger there. However, the judge never took the first step of issuing the order of removal. The government argued in Xinis’ court that the order of removal could be inferred, but the judge disagreed.
Without a final order of removal, Abrego Garcia can’t be deported, Xinis ruled.
The only way to get an order of removal is to go back to immigration court and ask for one, Rankin said. But reopening the immigration case is a gamble because Abrego Garcia’s attorneys would likely seek protection from deportation in the form of asylum or some other type of relief.
One wrinkle is that immigration courts are officially part of the executive branch, and the judges there are not generally viewed as being as independent as federal judges.
“There might be independence in some areas, but if the administration wants a certain result, by all accounts it seems they’re going to exert the pressure on the individuals to get that result,” Rankin said. “I hope he gets a fair shake, and two lawyers make arguments — somebody wins, somebody loses — instead of giving it to an immigration judge with a 95% denial rate, where everybody in the world knows how it’s gonna go down.”
Alternatively, the government could appeal Xinis’ order to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and try to get her ruling overturned, Rankin said. If the appeals court agreed with the government that the final order of removal was implied, there could be no need to reopen the immigration case.
In compliance with Xinis’ order, Abrego Garcia was released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening and allowed to return home for the first time in months. However, he was also told to report to an immigration officer in Baltimore early the next morning.
Fearing that he would be detained again, his attorneys asked Xinis for a temporary restraining order. Xinis filed that order early Friday morning. It prohibits immigration officials from taking Abrego Garcia back into custody, at least for the time being. A hearing on the issue could happen as early as next week.
Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case where he is charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling.
Prosecutors claim he accepted money to transport, within the United States, people who were in the country illegally. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
Abrego Garcia has asked U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw to dismiss the smuggling charges on the grounds of “selective or vindictive prosecution.”
Crenshaw earlier found “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive” and said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern.” Crenshaw specifically cited a statement by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on a Fox News Channel program that seemed to suggest the Justice Department charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case.
The two sides have been sparring over whether senior Justice Department officials, including Blanche, can be required to testify in the case.
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