Second recount continues to show NC Sen. Berger trailing in contested GOP primary
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Machine recount and a sample hand review leave Berger trailing by 23.
- Berger alleges irregularities could affect up to 13 ballots and seeks full hand review.
- Rockingham and Guilford boards will hear protests; state board may act too.
UPDATE: At 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Berger conceded the race. Read our story here.
Two recounts later, the result remains the same: North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger trails his Republican primary opponent, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, by 23 votes.
Election officials in Guilford and Rockingham counties completed a partial hand recount of the race on Tuesday after a full machine recount last week showed no change in the results.
In a statement, an adviser for Page’s campaign once again called on Berger to concede.
“After these ballots have been counted three times, the result remains exactly the same — Sam Page defeated Phil Berger,” the adviser, Patrick Sebastian, said.
Representatives for Berger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tuesday’s recount, which reviewed a random sample of over 1,000 ballots in 3% of precincts and early voting sites, did not change the totals. For Berger to trigger a full hand-to-eye recount, which he has pushed for, he would have needed a net gain of two votes.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the race is over, though.
Berger has filed a series of election protests alleging that irregularities in the vote counting process could have affected as many as 13 ballots cast in the race. Those alone wouldn’t be enough to clear Berger’s gap with Page, but election protests can, in rare cases, lead to a new election being called.
Rockingham County will hold an evidentiary hearing into Berger’s protests on Friday. Guilford County will consider Berger’s protest on April 6.
Don Powell, the Republican chair of the Rockingham County Board of Elections, told reporters that the hearing will proceed unless the campaigns pull out, but that the board may choose not to accept the protests if they are not outcome-determinative.
“If the total vote count would not change the outcome of the election, then we don’t really have to go forward with that,” he said.
Berger may also attempt to secure a hand recount anyway. Since election night, he has asked the State Board of Elections twice to alter the recount process and recount some specific ballots by hand. Both times, the board has declined his request.
Specifically, Berger has focused on roughly 220 ballots that contain either “undervotes,” which is when a voter is recorded as not having marked a preference in the race, or “overvotes,” when a voter marked more than one preference and subsequently did not have their choice counted.
Berger argues that these ballots should be examined by hand to determine if the voter’s intended choice was actually clear, but was not picked up by the vote counting machines.
In Rockingham, five undervotes were examined in Tuesday’s sample recount. In each case, the county elections board agreed that the voter did not mark any choice in the Berger-Page primary.
“There wasn’t even a fingerprint on it,” Powell said. “There wasn’t a smudge or anything else, so it was completely clean.”
The State Board of Elections plans to meet again on Wednesday morning to certify the results of all of this month’s primary elections. They may also consider any further requests from the Berger campaign.
Powell said he believed the recounts showed that the election was conducted accurately.
“All we hear about is election integrity and ‘this vote was stolen’ and ‘that election was stolen’ and ‘this person did this,’” he said. “So when you see something as transparent as we’ve made it here in Rockingham County ... I think it just goes to reinforce the idea that the people in this county and across the state, I think, are doing everything as right as rain and the equipment that we’re using is almost infallible.”
Speaking to reporters earlier in the day, Page said he was also confident in the work of election officials, but repeated his call for State Auditor Dave Boliek to recuse himself from the recount process.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Because if it appears to be an air of impropriety, you need to just de-conflict, step aside.”
Boliek, who has supported Berger’s campaign, appoints members of election boards thanks to legislation passed with the Senate leader’s help.
He does not, however, have a formal role in the recount process and has repeatedly said that he has nothing to recuse himself from.
Capitol Bureau Chief Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 24, 2026 at 12:02 PM.
