Nearly two weeks after Election Day, some election results aren’t set in stone. With ongoing canvasses in several counties, and a few recounts on the horizon, it may take several days or weeks until every winner is decided.
Such was the case four years ago, when Republican Paul Newby edged out Democrat Cheri Beasley to keep his seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court by 406 votes.
After a recount, Newby was still up by 401 votes, or 0.007% of the total votes cast in the judicial race. Today, people still question the election.
But Newby and Beasley have got nothing on this year’s race for North Carolina Supreme Court.
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Before the canvass, current Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin was leading incumbent Democrat Supreme Court Judge Allison Riggs by a narrow margin. By the end of Friday night, Riggs had flipped the race to her favor.
Riggs remained ahead at the close of the canvass Monday evening, up by just 66 votes. As more votes were tallied, Riggs’ lead grew to 625 votes by 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, a 0.02% edge in the statewide contest.
The race flip sparked suspicion on social media of a “stolen” election. Really, the reason for the change was much more benign — the post-election canvass.
Every election, the results posted on election night are unofficial. In North Carolina, unofficial results do not include absentee ballots that are turned in on Election Day before the 7:30 p.m. deadline or provisional ballots.
Election officials must research the latter in the 10 days between Election Day and the canvass to determine whether provisional voters were eligible to vote at the polling place where they cast their ballot. Officials do not add these voters’ choices to the count until they verify the eligibility, which can be a lengthy process.
Sometimes, when an election is close enough, these absentee and provisional ballots can make a difference, which appears to be the case this year. And when the results are still very close, recounts may determine the final outcome.
Who’s calling for recounts, how do they work?
Griffin’s campaign consultant, Paul Shumaker, said the campaign intended to file a request for recount Tuesday. He warned of a “long, protracted legal fight” ahead.
“There’s a lot of questionable things done in this process,” Shumaker said.
He mentioned concerns in several counties, including Wake County’s acceptance of several deceased voters during its canvass, as well as the timing of the canvass completion as causes for concern.
Alongside the North Carolina Republican Party and his campaign committee, Griffin filed a lawsuit Monday morning against the State Board of Elections asking for more information before deciding whether to file election protests, which are due by 5 p.m. the second business day after the canvass ends.
Election protests concern alleged irregularities with an election other than vote counting or result tabulation, which can be protested before the canvass.
In the suit, Griffin argued that he didn’t yet have enough information to make an election protest. The suit stated that he was waiting for public records requests involving curbside voters, voters convicted of felonies, deceased voters and voters who are suspected to have voted in-person and absentee. He wanted the court to compel the State Board to produce those records more quickly.
State Board spokesperson Pat Gannon said the board has provided Griffin with the requested records as of Monday evening.
Runner-up candidates for statewide offices can call for recounts until noon on the second day after the canvass.
Depending on how many votes were cast in the election, the recount threshold is either when the difference between candidates is 10,000 votes or 0.5% of total votes cast — whichever is fewer votes.
Runner-up candidates for county-level races, including legislative races encompassing only one county, are eligible for recounts if the difference between votes is 1% or less of the total votes cast.
They must request a recount by 5 p.m. on the first business day after the canvass. For counties that completed their canvass Friday, the deadline has already passed.
Recounts must be conducted before the statewide canvassing on Nov. 26. If one is demanded, impacted counties will conduct recounts during open meetings.
According to State Board rules, the first recount will be a machine recount. Ballots that the voting machine rejects will be counted by hand by a bipartisan team including two officials from the Democratic Party and two from the Republican Party.
The recount will occur within three days of the request.
If the first recount does not reverse the results, the candidate who originally called for a recount may demand a second recount. Any second recounts consist of a hand-to-eye recount in a sample of precincts. If extrapolating that sample to all precincts would change the result, then a hand-to-eye recount is conducted in all precincts.
If the first recount does reverse the results, the candidate who drops into second place may also request a second recount.
Democrat Lorenza Wilkins called for a recount in his race against Republican Allen Chesser for state house. The two are separated by 461 votes and nearly 1% of the total votes cast in the Nash County race.
Democrat challenger Bryan Cohn defeated Republican Frank Sossamon for another state house seat including parts of Granville and Vance counties. Sossamon did not respond to requests for comment, and did not share any plans to call for a recount publicly.
If he won the seat, the Republicans would maintain a supermajority in both chambers of the North Carolina legislature.
Cohn, however, did comment on his campaign Facebook page.
“This victory proves once again: that your vote matters,” he wrote. “While our opponent could request a recount, history shows recounts rarely change outcomes. In fact, our lead even grew as provisional ballots were counted.”
In the state Senate, Democrat Terence Everitt flipped the race against Republican Ashlee Bryan Adams during the canvass. The race was within five votes before the final Wake County canvass votes were tallied, with Adams in the lead. Now, Everitt has a 134-vote advantage.
A representative for Adams said she is meeting with attorneys and will announce whether she is requesting a recount on Tuesday.
Finally, Democrat Mrs. Woodson Bradley won her state Senate seat with 204 more votes than Republican Stacie McGinn. McGinn did not respond to requests for comment, but has posted on social media that she filed her recount paperwork Monday.
Why did the canvass take so long?
In North Carolina, the post-election canvass, where official votes are tallied, is supposed to be completed on the 10th day after Election Day. But by the end of Friday night, election workers in 13 counties hadn’t finished the job, potentially delaying the period for recounts to be requested.
Monday, they resumed work. County elections leaders cited different reasons for delay.
In Chatham County, the problem was voter challenges, deputy elections director Chance Mashburn said.
Voters who die in between the time they cast their vote during the mail-in absentee or early voting period and Election Day are removed from the official count, he said.
“We had to delete their voter history and the results, just like every other county was doing Friday, and we got down to three voters and the meeting had already lasted to 5 o’clock.”
Mashburn suggested the turnout rate in Chatham County led to a higher number of voter challenges. Chatham County led the state this cycle with nearly 83% of registered voters in the county showing up to the polls.
Finding the ballots that need to be removed is a “time suck,” said Wake County Board of Elections member Gerry Cohen.
Wake County had 71 deceased voters. Each had to be sent a notice about a scheduled hearing, where they could appear and testify that they were not in fact deceased.
“Then we had to find the 71 ballots, and those were scattered through votes by mail and early voting, which was about maybe 2000 boxes,” Cohen said.
The State Board has cracked down on making sure deceased voters’ votes don’t count this year, but Cohen is uncertain where their interpretation that those votes must be removed comes from.
Cohen previously worked in the General Assembly alongside legislators to draft election law. In 2014, he worked with Thom Tillis on a bill that would have explicitly stated that death of a voter is not grounds for a vote challenge if they were alive at the time they cast a ballot. It passed in the state house but not the state Senate.
Hearings were held for deceased voters Friday, at the start of canvass. Several next of kin came in to testify. Some expressed dismay at their parents being removed, who “had been so excited about voting as one of the last things they wanted to do in life,” Cohen said. The Wake County Board of Elections voted 3-2 to accept those votes.
The entire process of handling death notices took about four hours, he said.
Sampson County completed its canvass around 3 p.m. on Monday. Elections director Niya Rayner said their county’s process for counting write-in votes was to blame for the delay.
“When someone fills in the write-in bubble, the tabulator takes an image of that write-in category,” she said. “What we noticed when we tallied was that the tallies were inaccurate when printing. The printer kept jamming, so it double-printed multiple copies of a write-in, so we had to go back and reprint.”
Others cited a new North Carolina law, which established new rules for same-day registrants and counting early votes.
The law, passed this year, requires individuals who register to vote and vote on the same day during early voting to take an extra step to have their votes counted.
“So there’s a new law that the legislature blessed us with that says that same day registrants, their addresses have to be verified, and if their verification postcard comes back, they have to be notified and given the opportunity to cure that deficiency,” Cumberland County Board of Elections Chair Irene Grimes said.
Once county boards of elections verify a same-day registrant’s driver’s license or social security number, search for duplicate registrations and update the statewide voter registration database, they must send the same-day registrant a voter registration card through non-forwardable mail to verify their address.
Previously, if the mail came back to the United State Postal Service as undeliverable, then there would have been a second mailing. If that was also returned as undeliverable, the same-day registrant’s voter registration would be denied, and their ballot would be removed from the count.
The new law removed the second mailing.
“The problem for the people that didn’t like same-day registration was you would never finish two mailings before the election, before the canvass, so that the vote would always count, even though later, the person might move the voter off the voter rolls,” Cohen said.
After some litigation was filed over this change, Cohen said county boards were charged with notifying voters that the mailing had been returned as undeliverable and giving them the opportunity to prove that they were a resident.
Those hearings happened on Thursday, the day before the canvass.
In Wake County, there were 41 same-day registrants who failed the mail verification process. In six cases, the mail was sent to the wrong address. Two people got the mailing even though it was returned as undeliverable and came in with proof of address. The other 33 voters were deleted from the count.
In Cumberland County, that left 117 voters whose addresses could not be verified and needed to be removed, Grimes said.
“That has to be done manually,” she said on Monday. “Cumberland County had a little over 140,000 voters, so the staff over the weekend went through those ballots and pulled them out, and today they deducted the votes so we can finish canvass at 4 p.m.”
Randolph County elections director Melissa Kirstner also said her staff worked through the weekend to pull out ballots of voters who did not fix their address issue.
She expected Monday’s reconvened canvass to pass quickly, since all that was left was signing official certification papers.
Cohen wants people to know that many counties started working on the canvass days early.
“I’ve seen Tweets from people saying that this shows that the boards of elections are incompetent,” he said. “No, they were given an impossible task and not enough time to do it right.”
Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated.
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