What’s the cost of North Carolina election policies? In this tiny town, $190 per voter

Amid rising concerns about the security of electronic voting nationwide, small towns in North Carolina are facing an additional problem at the polls: the high cost of voting.

Voters in Columbia, N.C., population 890, cast their ballots this month for town aldermen. The two incumbents were running uncontested. Only 32 people voted in an election that cost local taxpayers about $6,000, said Columbia Town Manager Rhett White.

In previous years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections has allowed small municipalities to count paper ballots by hand in uncontested elections. Columbia’s last election cost only $2,500, less than half the cost for counting the ballots with a machine, White said.

This year, the state board required the use of machines, writing in a memo to the county board of elections: “Due to concerns with [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliance and [Help American Vote Act] requirements, hand counting is no longer permitted for municipal elections.”

For Columbia, the seat of Tyrrell County, one of the poorest counties in the state, this means shouldering an additional cost of roughly $3,500.

“It just seems like the bureaucracy seems to ignore the fiscal concerns … for small municipalities like ours, which often have less than 200 people voting in municipal elections,” Mayor James Cahoon wrote in August to the associate general counsel at the State Board of Elections. “I just feel that this is another case of ‘one-size-fits-all,’ and individual circumstances are not given serious consideration.”

The town’s total annual budget is approximately $1.5 million. Its general fund, which covers everything from maintenance of public buildings to mosquito control, as well as elections, is just under $800,000.

Columbia is a town “where every penny is important,” the mayor said in an email to The News & Observer.

The State Board of Elections’ decision to require electronic counting comes down to privacy concerns for voters in wheelchairs or those who have other disabilities. The state says feeding the ballot into a machine is more private than slipping it into a box.

“It was a difficult decision, but ensuring all voters can vote independently is vital to the elections process,” said elections board spokesman Patrick Gannon in an email.

Law violations ‘a higher cost’

For disability advocates, safeguarding the right to vote for all residents is paramount, regardless of the cost.

“To deny access to any lawful registered voter is a violation of law, which would ultimately have a higher cost” than using electronic machines, said Vicki Smith, the executive director of the Alliance of Disability Advocates NC, a social services organization, in an email.

“Just because an electronic machine is used does not make it automatically accessible to every person with a disability,” Smith said.

A visually impaired voter, for example, faces different challenges at the poll than a quadriplegic voter and “accommodations will be different,” she said.

Officials in Columbia are prepared to fight for the right to use hand-counting. White, the town manager, said the town plans to ask its state representative Rep. Ed Goodwin, a Republican, to introduce a bill next year to allow small municipalities to hand count whether or not the elections are contested.

In some counties in North Carolina, electronic counting has been the norm for years. The Johnston County Board of Elections, which oversees elections in its 11 municipalities, uses machines to count paper ballots and does not allow any exceptions for small towns.

This year, unofficial results show that 9.5% of eligible voters, or 3,376 people, cast their ballots in November, according to Leigh Anne Price, director of the Johnston County Board of Elections.

In the town of Micro, whose population hovers around 500, only 33 people cast ballots in a contested election out of an eligible 253 voters. The cost to the town will amount to about $1,800, Price said.

In the town of Franklinton in Franklin County, this year’s mayoral race was uncontested, though the town commissioners’ race was not. About 191 people voted out of 1,436 eligible voters, said Michelle Chavis, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Privacy concerns for disabled voters

Cahoon maintained that “there’s more privacy with a paper ballot because you’re folding it and putting it in the box. With an electronic ballot, it has to be fed into the computer by an election official,” he said.

The total cost per voter in this year’s elections — nearly $190 — “goes beyond anything that’s reasonable,” said White, the Columbia town manager.

“There are just better ways we could use the funds to manage our small town,” said Lloyd Armstrong, one of the aldermen re-elected in Columbia this month.

In Tyrrell County, 24.4% of the residents live below the poverty line, compared with the national average of 11.8%. It’s the third-poorest county in North Carolina, according to the U.S. Census. There is little industry in this flood-prone region in the eastern part of the state.

When Hurricane Dorian swept through this September, it blew a foot and a half of water into the downtown, damaging infrastructure and bringing down trees. Due to lack of funds, some of the trees are still blocking canals, leading to severe drainage problems, said White.

“Drainage,” said Sandra Owens, the other re-elected alderman in Columbia, when asked how the town could have spent the money that instead was spent on elections.

Owens, a self-employed taxidermist, lives in the house she grew up in, which she said never used to flood. In a recent hurricane, the flooding in her taxidermy shop reached 28 inches.

“Now it seems like every time we get a hurricane, the tidewater gets in,” Owens said. “It’s just a bad situation.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2019 at 12:51 PM.