A resident of Miami Township in south central Montgomery County, Ohio between Miamisburg and Germantown, he irritated party and education officials with his bids for office and had been the subject of scathing articles in the Dayton press.
Griffin won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Representative from Ohio's Eighth Congressional District in 1976, 1980, and 1982, each time losing to Republican incumbent Tom Kindness.
In 1978, Griffin ran for Congress again, winning the Democratic nomination to challenge incumbent Republican Tennyson Guyer in the Fourth District.
Griffin was elected in 1992 to the Ohio State Board of Education, defeating three-term incumbent Chester A. Roush in the Third District for a two-year term.
The Dayton Daily News that year ran a series of scathing pieces about Griffin's behavior during his first term on the state board and his tax problems.
Immediately after the election, party leaders in Dayton vowed they would try to remove him from office and the Daily News ran more scathing opinions – one writer called him a "rat" – but Griffin served on the board until his death.