North Carolina’s Supreme Court has temporarily prohibited the state’s Board of Elections from certifying the election of sitting Democratic Justice Allison Riggs to the bench on Tuesday, despite her 734-vote victory over Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin.

The court’s decision is not an out-and-out bar on the certification of the election’s results; it’s a stay, meaning the board of election can’t declare the results final. The state Board of Elections was set to certify the results of the November 5, 2024, election Friday absent the court’s intervention.

Griffin, who sits on the state’s Court of Appeals, and state Republicans have filed hundreds of cases challenging Riggs’s victory. Those cases hinge on the claim that 60,000 ballots are ineligible, primarily because voters did not provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote.

The battle for the Supreme Court seat is part of the power struggle that has long animated North Carolina politics, particularly in the past eight years since the election of former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

The effort to seat Griffin follows congressional gerrymandering meant to favor the GOP, legal maneuvering weakening the power of incoming Democratic officials, and the........

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