A contested election for North Carolina’s state Supreme Court may leave the apparent winner in an unusual position — having the outcome of the vote decided by fellow justices on the bench whose spouses gave campaign contributions to her opponent.

In November, the incumbent, Associate Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, appeared to barely eke out a victory over her challenger, Jefferson Griffin, a Republican seeking to move up from the state Court of Appeals. After two recounts, the North Carolina election board tally has Riggs winning by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast.

But Griffin challenged the outcome in court, seeking to invalidate more than 60,000 mail-in and early in-person votes. With Riggs recusing herself, the state Supreme Court denied a request by Griffin to fast-track the case, and sent it to a lower state court. But it also kept the election board from certifying Riggs as the winner. The dispute has bounced between state and federal courts, with a federal appeals court to hear the case Monday on whether it should be in the state courts.

Where the outcome is decided may be pivotal. Riggs has sought to keep the case at the federal level, while Griffin asked the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court, to which he’s trying to be elected, to fast-track it.

“We have always known that Griffin’s baseless challenges should be heard and decided in federal court,” Riggs said Thursday in a statement. “It’s telling that he is already trying to delay the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ review in light of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s order. Voters decide elections and deserve a swift resolution from our federal courts.”

The state Supreme Court’s 5-2 GOP majority is an obvious reason Griffin might prefer his chances there. But he may like it for another reason: He has described his relationship with Chief Justice Paul Newby as a mentor/mentee one, and Newby’s spouse, along with that of Associate Justice Tamara Barringer, contributed to Griffin’s campaign, according to campaign finance records.

Those records show that Newby’s wife, Macon Newby, contributed $6,400 to Griffin’s campaign in June 2023.

Brent Barringer, Tamara Barringer’s husband, also gave Griffin at least $6,400 for his Supreme Court campaign, according to campaign finance records.

Justices Newby and Barringer have not recused themselves from decisions in the case so far, and Newby has sounded sympathetic to Griffin’s claims in his writings. Neither justice responded immediately to a request for comment left with their offices Monday.

On Thursday, Newby wrote that Griffin led by almost 10,000 votes on election night before trailing by 734.

“That is a highly unusual course of events. It is understandable that petitioner and many North Carolina voters are questioning how this could happen,” he wrote. (It’s not actually an unusual course of events: Electoral leads change all the time as additional ballots are counted.)

He also defended Griffin’s right to challenge the outcome, which has been criticized in part because in previous elections, Griffin himself voted using the military absentee ballot ― the type of vote he hopes to invalidate now.

In July 2023, Griffin told the North State Journal that he considered Newby a longtime supporter.

“The Chief Justice has been a good friend and mentor for a long time back from my days when I moved to Raleigh and was an assistant DA in Wake County,” he said, according to the newspaper.

Griffin also reportedly said he was on the bench for two years with another associate justice, Richard Dietz, when Dietz was at the state Court of Appeals, and that he had good relationships with the three other GOP associate justices, Barringer, Trey Allen, and Phil Berger Jr.

While the donations may raise eyebrows, they appear not to be prohibited under the state’s code of judicial conduct. The code explicitly states that spouses of judges may engage in political activity.

And the practice is not confined to the court’s Republicans.

Charles Walton ― husband of Associate Justice Anita Earls, Riggs’ fellow Democrat on the court ― contributed more than $1,800 to Riggs in 2023 and 2024, according to campaign finance records.

But the code also says judges should be wary of being influenced by their wives or husbands.

“A judge should not allow the judge’s family, social or other relationships to influence the judge’s judicial conduct or judgment,” the code notes.