Rumors Confirmed: Cox Resigns at NCSBE

Sept 2, 2025 — While we’ve found no news reports on this, I was able to get confirmation, in writing, from a CBE Director: North Carolina State Board of Elections Counsel has resigned, effective the last day of August, 2025.

Many blame Cox for 2024’s electoral fiasco over the tens of thousands of voters whose registrations were never correctly filed, per federal law. At issue was the requirement for

all persons registering to vote to provide their state driver’s license (or official DMV ID) on the application. In cases where the voter lacks either of those documents, they are required to provide the last four digits of their Social Security Number (SSN-4). In the rare case where the applicant has neither, the election officials are required to register them anyway and just assign them a “unique” voter number that isn’t duplicated elsewhere on the voter rolls.

For more than 20 years, the NCSBE voter registration form has illegally stated the NCDL# and the SSN-4 were “optional,” which had the effect of conflating honest voters from the fictional or non-citizen voters. One honest voter explained how his numbers were missing from the record by saying, “the form said it was optional, so I followed the directions.”

Hardly believing any lawfully present human being in North Carolina would lack both a DMV license (or ID card) and a Social Security number, a post-2020 group called NC Audit Force, filed an official complaint with the SBE. This was in the last half of 2023 and in December, the SBE issued a terribly flawed finding that addressed the group’s two major complaints.

In late 2023, the Board agreed to correct the registration form, but continued to process non-compliant registrations up through the November 2024 elections.

As to the 225,000 voters, whom the Board had registered since 2004, when the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) first mandated the Personally Identifying Information (called P-I-I), the SBE decided they were not required to update the records with that information. Though they had more than a year to update the records, they voted to blow off the federal statute, after getting their legal opinion from Mr. Cox.

As a result of that fateful decision, judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin had to file suit over the 70,000-ish non-HAVA compliant voters who had actually voted in his election, which was decided by around 700 votes.

Griffin lost, but appealed all the way up the NC State Supreme Court, where he lost again. Then, he filed an appeal to federal court, which also shot it down.

Along the way, the Left spared no expense in smearing Griffin, but he eventually conceded defeat and Allison Riggs was sworn in for a full six-year term.

We knew Griffin would lose, because of the horrible remedy his attorneys proposed involving throwing out all 70,000 voters and recalculating the results. Rather than drag this post down to a CLE for attorneys, I’ll just say that every relevant federal ruling since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 PROHIBITS the removal of a voter who has some sort of flaw in a registration form, once it’s accepted and registered by election officials.

In fact, their remedy was so ridiculous, in our opinion, that Yours Truly filed a pro se Amicus request to the NC Court of Appeals, and they voted to allow my brief!

You can see the story about my 15 seconds of fame here, but the upshot was that they partially ordered my remedy and ordered the SBE to start updating their records by conducting voter list maintenance mailings to all of the non-HAVA compliant voters who voted in the Griffin-Riggs contest.

Acting as if they never bothered to read the opinion, the NC State Supreme Court overruled the Appellate Court opinion, by screaming about how they “cannot disenfranchise 70,000 voters.” Since my remedy devised a plan to give all 70k voters their due process, the state’s highest court embarrassed themselves with the ruling… but I digress.

If you’re curious about my Amicus brief, here’s a link to it.

The happy ending to the story is that the Trump 2.0 US Department of Justice sued the NCSBE over that issue, which was first made known by the heroic actions of a humble but severely P-O’d grandmother named Carol Snow.

We don’t know what made Cox resign, but it cannot be denied: The entire costly Griffin-Riggs fiasco would never have happened if Paul Cox had given better legal advice to the NC State Board of Elections.

Whatever the reason, that blunder was reason enough for our crew.

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