'The equities are with the voters': Berger pushes back on Griffin's effort to discard 60K ballots over incomplete registration

In a rare public rebuke of a fellow Republican, GOP Senate leader Phil Berger took exception to a key protest category in Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing effort to overturn a Supreme Court race.

Republican Senate leader Phil Berger attends a legislative session on Jan. 8, 2025.

North Carolina’s most powerful Republican is clapping back at an ongoing effort by GOP Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to discard the ballots of more than 60,000 voters.

To overturn an apparent 734-vote defeat to Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, Griffin’s attorneys want to remove votes of those lacking their driver’s license number or last four digits of their Social Security number on a voter registration database.

In a rare public rebuke of a fellow Republican, GOP Senate leader Phil Berger on Tuesday suggested Griffin’s effort to remove voters over clerical issues was a bridge too far.

“The equities are with the voters there,” Berger told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t think that they had a way of knowing that that was a deficiency as far as their registration is concerned."