Abstract
Through the lens of a protracted battle over a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2024, this Article considers the problem of election contest gamesmanship: the manipulation of the procedures states use to resolve post-election disputes in an effort to subvert the democratic results of an election. This Article illustrates how election contest gamesmanship problematizes basic assumptions of federal voting rights doctrines, exploiting the traditional deference afforded to the operation of state election administration procedures to evade federal judicial scrutiny and advance strictly partisan ends. The result is a unique and pernicious threat to the fair administration of elections, the constitutional rights of individual voters, and public confidence in the democratic process.
While election contest gamesmanship is not itself a new phenomenon, federal courts have, for the most part, not treated it as a distinct problem. Similarly, no prior scholarship has addressed the problem of election contest gamesmanship head on. Presently, these gaps allow losing candidates to maintain election contests that thwart the democratic functions of elections and impose significant costs on candidates, voters, and election officials. Even where litigation ultimately succeeds in preserving the results of an election, the current federal court norm of deferring to states to adjudicate election contest gamesmanship in the first instance has serious consequences for the capacity of elections to foster democratic legitimacy and stability in government. This Article proposes that federal courts adopt a new equitable doctrine—what it names, after one of the protagonists in the North Carolina Supreme Court litigation, the "Griffin principle"—that mitigates these consequences, preserves the democratic function of elections, and is consistent with the structure and normative underpinnings of existing election law doctrines.
Citation
Samuel Davis,
The Griffin Principle: Defining and Deterring Election Contest Gamesmanship,
21 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy
193-276
(2026)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/djclpp/vol21/iss1/4