NC election officials confirm voting irregularities in one county, blame human error
Officials in a North Carolina county accidentally inflated the votes in one Super Tuesday primary election, but fixed the problem on Thursday.
Tuesday’s election results are still unofficial everywhere in the state, and officials at the N.C. State Board of Elections will do audits all around the state regardless of whether voting results appear wrong. In one rural area, however, they have already found an issue and say it was due to human error.
“It’s very important to note that the results on the election night reporting system are unofficial and this is ongoing,” Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the elections board, said in an interview Thursday morning.
Warren County, a small community north of Raleigh on the Virginia border, has only 41 registered Libertarian voters. But on Tuesday the county reported more than 800 votes cast in the Libertarian presidential race.
The county also has just one registered Constitution Party voter and one registered Green Party voter — but mistakenly reported dozens of votes cast in both primaries.
By Thursday afternoon, however, the county had figured out what went wrong and submitted the correct numbers. In reality, the new numbers show, both of the county’s single Constitution Party and Green Party voters cast a ballot. So did five — not 863 — Libertarians, most of whom voted for “No Preference” instead of picking one of the 16 candidates on the ballot.
So what caused the original results to be so wrong for those races?
Before each election, counties run what are called “logic and accuracy” tests of their voting software to ensure there are no problems. A top state election official, Katelyn Love, wrote in a press release that on Thursday afternoon that on election night, Warren County officials accidentally reported those test results.
“This is why election night results are always unofficial” until the state’s audits are complete, she said.
The investigation began after reports of the county’s suspicious voting results started circulating on social media. But Love said even if people hadn’t spotted it, the state still would have caught it before finalizing the results.
“The error could occur in a county using any type of election equipment, and would have been caught by one of the numerous audits that take place prior to canvass,” Love said.
For instance, the investigation into suspicious absentee ballot results in 2018’s 9th Congressional District race began with a state elections board investigation. It ended in the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, dropping out. McCrae Dowless, who worked for his campaign, now faces criminal charges. After the state ordered a do-over election, a different Republican, Dan Bishop, won and is now in Congress.
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This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 11:41 AM.
