Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin is getting the audience he wanted for his claim that 60,000 ballots should be invalidated in his electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs. A federal district court judge has remanded Griffin’s election protest to the heavily conservative state Supreme Court, the same court Griffin is trying to join.

After the general election and two recounts — a statewide machine recount and a partial hand-to-eye recount of ballots from randomly selected early voting sites and Election Day precincts in each county — Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent, holds a 734-vote lead over Griffin.

The vote count notwithstanding, Griffin, a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, has fought to throw out more than 60,000 ballots for alleged irregularities despite lacking evidence of any actual voter ineligibility.

In most of the cases, Griffin has alleged the disputed ballots were cast by voters who did not properly register under North Carolina law. The issue has to do with voters who registered — some of them many years and election cycles ago — using a form that predated the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002. The pre-HAVA registration form did not clearly mandate registrants provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver’s license number.

Griffin’s protests notwithstanding, neither state law nor HAVA makes having a Social Security number or a driver’s license number a prerequisite for voting.

In cases where elections officials cannot confirm the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number or that person’s driver’s license number — often due to a clerical error — that voter must present a so-called HAVA document, such as a utility bill, when they first show up to vote.

And if a person registering to vote does not have a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, HAVA provides that a state elections administration office must assign the voter a special identification number for the purposes or registering.

Griffin has also protested the counting of ballots submitted by some absentee military and overseas voters who did not provide photo identification, even though state administrative code, in accordance with federal law, explicitly excuses such overseas voters from that requirement.

Additionally, Griffin has alleged some ballots should be discarded because they were cast by ineligible voters who live overseas. These protests claim children of overseas voters — for example, missionaries and military personnel — who had never resided in North Carolina, should not have been allowed to vote, though such voters are eligible under state law, again, in line with federal laws protecting the voting rights of overseas citizens.

After the state elections board dismissed Griffin’s ballot protests due to a lack of evidence of improper voting and a failure to provide affected voters with adequate notice, the Republican candidate filed a writ of prohibition directly with the state Supreme Court.

Griffin circumvented the typical state court appeals process and asked the high court to block the elections board from certifying his electoral loss.

Attorneys for the state elections board had the case removed to federal court because, they argued, it raised federal questions about HAVA and other U.S. Constitutional voting rights protections.

But attorneys for Griffin disagreed and argued in their briefs to Judge E. Richard Myers II of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina that the matter at hand concerned an election for state office and unsettled questions of state, not federal, law.

Those arguments carried the day with Myers, a Donald Trump appointee, who, on Monday evening, remanded the case back to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

“Should a federal tribunal resolve such a dispute?” asked Judge Myers in his order, referring to the Griffin’s claims the disputed ballots should be invalidated.

“This court, with due regard for state sovereignty and the independence of states to decide matters of substantial public concern, thinks not,” Myers wrote, answering his own question.

The fact that North Carolina’s registration statute refers to, and aligns with, HAVA, did not sway Myers that the Griffin protests belong in federal court.

“Because Griffin’s first challenge does not require resort to HAVA,” Myers wrote in this order, referring to Griffin’s protests over allegedly incomplete voter registrations, “it does not necessarily raise a question of federal law.”

The challenges to overseas voters who never resided in North Carolina and military and overseas voters who did not provide photo IDs also only require interpretations of state law, according to Myers.

The state elections board was poised to certify the results of the election by Friday barring a court’s intervention. Judge Myers’s order could be appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The general counsel for the state elections board said his office is reviewing Myers’ order.