Two NC counties miscounted some votes, officials find in post-election review
Two rural Eastern North Carolina counties made mistakes reporting their voting results on election night, but they expected to fix the problems before the end of the day Monday, state elections officials say.
Robeson County officials forgot to report their results from one early voting site. And in Washington County, officials accidentally double-counted people’s mail-in ballots.
Both mistakes were caught during a canvass, in which officials double-check voting results before finalizing their vote count. It’s a routine process that exists to catch mistakes like these, said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections.
“The canvass process exists to ensure votes are counted accurately,” Brinson Bell said in a Sunday night news release. “This is the process working as it is supposed to work. This election will not be certified until we are certain the results are accurate.”
All told, the statewide results might change by around 3,000 votes. The results affected only the Supreme Court chief justice race which flipped the 45-vote lead held by incumbent Chief Justice Cheri Beasley to her colleague and opponent Justice Paul Newby, who ended the night with 342 more votes.
Robeson’s ballots were still marked as unofficial at 7:30 p.m. despite reporting its numbers.
Robeson County had been expected to add around 1,900 votes to its total count when they met Monday to address the forgotten early voting results. Officials in the county on the South Carolina border counted but forgot to report the results from one of their early voting sites — at the Pembroke Fire Department. They also had around 700 provisional ballots and 30 absentee ballots to add to the final count there.
Washington County subtracted around 650 votes from its total count when locals met at 9 a.m. Monday to discuss the problems there. According to the state elections board, county officials accidentally duplicated the results of all their mail-in ballots — and the current election results show around 1,300 people in that small northeastern county voted by mail.
Each of the state’s 100 counties is in charge of many of the details surrounding how elections are run, and state officials blamed the problems there on outdated machinery. They added that most counties in the state have newer equipment that wouldn’t be able to make the same double-counting mistake.
Due to mistakes or omissions like these, the votes reported on election night are always unofficial. Nearly all of North Carolina’s 100 counties have now finished their post-election canvass, although nine counties including Robeson and Washington still had some work to do.
Most of them were looking into challenges filed by Paul Newby, the Republican candidate for chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court.
After Washington County fixed its totals early Monday, Newby went from being 35 votes down to 231 votes up against the Democratic incumbent, Cheri Beasley.
Those razor-thin margins, in a race with nearly 5.4 million total votes cast, indicate it could go to a recount no matter what happens with the rest of the updates that were expected throughout the day Monday from Robeson County and elsewhere.
The Rockingham County Board of Elections announced Monday it would change its meeting to 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Once all the final counts and reviews are done, state officials will meet Nov. 24 to certify the 2020 election results and make them official.
This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 8:29 AM.
