RALEIGH, N.C. — The narrowly trailing Republican candidate in the race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court formally requested a recount on Tuesday, with barely 600 votes separating him from the Democratic incumbent.
Jefferson Griffin, an Appeals Court judge, sent the request before the noon deadline, marking the only statewide race in which a recount is about to take place. Recounts have also been requested for several single-county races, including five General Assembly races. The ballots will again be processed through calculators.
The State Board of Elections will meet on November 26 to complete the final counts and certify the results.
Associate Justice Allison Riggs led by 625 votes over Griffin on Tuesday as election officials in all but two small counties of the state’s 100 counties completed their work from last Friday’s count meetings.
Griffin led by about 10,000 votes after election night, but the margin taken last week while county boards of elections reviewed tens of thousands of provisional and absentee ballots and added vote choices of those eligible to count toward the totals. More than 5.5 million ballots have been cast in the Riggs-Griffin race.
If the current leaders in the General Assembly races where recounts have been requested maintain their advantages, Republicans will lose the veto-proof majority they have had in the General Assembly for the past two years in January.
Republicans won 71 of the 120 seats in the House of Representatives – one seat short of the veto-proof majority in that chamber.
The Republican Party would maintain that supermajority if it can win a state House race in which Republican Rep. Frank Sossamon trails Democrat Bryan Cohn by 233 votes out of more than 43,000 cast in the race covering Granville County and part of Vance County.
Republicans have gained the thirty seats needed to maintain a supermajority in the House in the fifty-seat Senate. But Democratic Governor-elect Josh Stein would be in a better position to permanently block the Republican bills he opposed with his veto seal if Republicans fail to maintain a three-fifths majority in the House of Representatives.
Candidates in legislative races who trail the leading vote-getter by 1 percentage point or less can request a recount.