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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.
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen sets “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on a record player at Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin Texas. He uses vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
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Lorianne Willett/KUT News
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Lying in her bed at Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas at Austin, 64-year-old Pamela Mansfield sways her feet to the rhythm of George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care.” Mansfield is still recovering much of her mobility after a recent neck surgery, but she finds a way to move to the music floating from a record player that was wheeled into her room.
“Seems to be the worst part is the stiffness in my ankles and the no feeling in the hands,” she says. “But music makes everything better.”
The record player is courtesy of the ATX-VINyL program, a project dreamed up by Dr. Tyler Jorgensen to bring music to the bedside of patients dealing with difficult diagnoses and treatments. He collaborates with a team of volunteers who wheel the player on a cart to patients’ rooms, along with a selection of records in their favorite genres.
“I think of this record player as a time machine,” he said. “You know, something starts spinning — an old, familiar song on a record player — and now you’re back at home, you’re out of the hospital, you’re with your family, you’re with your loved ones.”
Daniela Vargas, a volunteer for the ATX-VINyL program, wheels a record player to the hospital room of a palliative care patient in Austin, Texas.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
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The healing power of Country music… and Thin Lizzy
Mansfield wanted to hear country music: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, George Jones. That genre reminds her of listening to records with her parents, who helped form her taste in music. Almost as soon as the first record spins, she starts cracking jokes.
“I have great taste in music. Men, on the other hand … ehhh. I think my picker’s broken,” she says.
Other patients ask for jazz, R&B or holiday records.
The man who gave Jorgensen the idea for ATX-VINyL loved classic rock. That was around three years ago, when Jorgensen, a long-time emergency medicine physician, began a fellowship in palliative care — a specialty aimed at improving quality of life for people with serious conditions, including terminal illnesses.
Shortly after he began the fellowship, he says he struggled to connect with a particular patient.
“I couldn’t draw this man out, and I felt like he was really struggling and suffering,” Jorgensen said.
He had the idea to try playing the patient some music.
He went with “The Boys Are Back in Town,” by the 1970s Irish rock group Thin Lizzy, and saw an immediate change in the patient.
“He was telling me old stories about his life. He was getting more honest and vulnerable about the health challenges he was facing,” Jorgensen said. “And it just struck me that all this time I’ve been practicing medicine, there’s such a powerful tool that is almost universal to the human experience, which is music, and I’ve never tapped into it.”
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen plays vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients in Austin, Texas. Willie Nelson’s albums are a perennial hit.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
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Creating new memories
Jorgensen realized records could lift the spirits of patients dealing with heavy circumstances in hospital spaces that are often aesthetically bare. And he thought vinyl would offer a more personal touch than streaming a digital track through a smartphone or speaker.
“There’s just something inherently warm about the friction of a record — the pops, the scratches,” he said. “It sort of resonates through the wooden record player, and it just feels different.”
Since then, he has built up a collection of 60 records and counting at the hospital. The most-requested album, by a landslide, is Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours from 1977. Willie is also popular, along with Etta James and John Denver. And around the holidays, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas gets a lot of spins.
These days, it’s often a volunteer who rolls the record player from room to room after consulting nursing staff about patients and family members who are struggling and could use a visit.
Daniela Vargas, the UT Austin pre-med undergraduate who heads up the volunteer cohort, became passionate about music therapy years ago when she and her sister began playing violin for isolated patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she sees similar benefits when she curates a collection of records for a patient today.
“We are usually not in the room for the entire time, so it’s a more intimate experience for the patient or family, but being able to interact with the patient in the beginning and at the end can be really transformative,” Vargas said.
Often, the palliative care patients visited by ATX-VINyL are near the end of life.
Jorgensen feels that the record player provides an interruption of the heaviness those patients and their families are experiencing. Suddenly, it’s possible to create a new, positive shared experience at a profoundly difficult time.
“Now you’re sort of looking at it together and thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this thing? Let’s play something for Mom, let’s play something for Dad.’” he said. “And you are creating a new, positive, shared experience in the setting of something that can otherwise be very sad, very heavy.”
Other patients, like Pamela Mansfield, are working painstakingly toward recovery.
She has had six neck surgeries since April, when she had a serious fall. But on the day she listened to the George Jones album, she had a small victory to celebrate: She stood up for three minutes, a record since her most recent surgery.
With the record spinning, she couldn’t help but think about the victories she’s still pursuing.
“It’s motivating,” she said. “Me and my broom could dance really well to some of this stuff.”
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By Caroline Kitchener, Melanie Bencosme, Karen Hanley, June Kim and Pierre Kattar
December 22, 2025
After prolonged heavy rainfall and devastating flooding across the Pacific north-west in the past few weeks, further flood watches have been issued across California through this week.
With 50-75mm (2-3in) of rainfall already reported across northern California this weekend, a series of atmospheric rivers will continue to bring periods of heavy rain and mountain snow across the northern and central parts of the state, with flood watches extending until Friday.
Cumulative rainfall totals are expected to widely exceed 50mm (2in) across a vast swathe of California by Boxing Day, but with totals around 200-300mm (8-12in) possible for the north-western corner of California and western-facing slopes of the northern Sierra Nevada mountains.
Los Angeles could receive 100-150mm (4-6in) of rainfall between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which could make it one of the wettest Christmases on record for the city. River and urban flooding are likely – particularly where there is run-off from high ground – with additional risks of mudslides and rockslides in mountain and foothill areas.
Winter storm warnings are also in effect for Yosemite national park, with the potential for 1.8-2.4 metres (6-8ft) of accumulating snow by Boxing Day. Heavy snow alongside strong winds will make travel very difficult over the festive period.
Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds are forecast across large parts of Zimbabwe leading up to Christmas. A level 2 weather warning has been issued by the Meteorological Services Department from Sunday 21 December to Wednesday 24 December. Some areas are expected to see more than 50mm of rainfall within a 24-hour period. The rain will be accompanied by hail, frequent lightning, and strong winds. These conditions have been attributed to the interaction between warm, moist air with low-pressure systems over the western and northern parts of the country.
Australia will see some large variations in temperatures over the festive period. Sydney, which is experiencing temperatures above 40C, is expected to tumble down to about 22C by Christmas Day, about 5C below average for this time of year. Perth is going to see temperatures gradually creep up, reaching a peak of 40C around Christmas Day. This is about 10C above average for this time of year.
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