Dec. 6, 2004
On Balance, N.C. Election Got Job Done
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - Step back and take a deep breath.
This year North Carolina was not an updated version of the Florida 2000 General Election. Our state’s Nov. 2 election worked.
No, this is not a message from the ostrich farm. The system delivered honest and accurate election results with two notable exceptions in regard to accuracy. One of those exceptions has affected the outcome in the Council of State race for Commissioner of Agriculture, which is still unsettled.
Overall, citizens knew on Nov. 3 the winners and losers of this election. We also learned that close elections test the system and highlight the flaws. And it is proper to examine those flaws.
Early voting. This was the big surprise in this year’s process. The presidential race always drives voter participation, and interest in this race was much higher than in 2000. Election officials expected a larger turnout.
What they didn’t anticipate was how large the turnout would be. Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said about 343,000 people voted early in 2000.
This year, that number jumped to over 1 million, and election officials throughout the state were caught off guard. There were long lines and long waits.
Provisional ballots. North Carolina was familiar with provisional ballots unlike a number of states. (These are ballots that are given to voters whose names are not on their local precinct’s rolls because of address changes or late registration processing, etc.) Here again, the number of such ballots was much higher than predicted.
High estimates said 40,000 provisional ballots would be cast; the actual number was over 70,000. In some counties, it took several days to count such ballots because they have to be manually processed.
Still, voters and candidates were well served by extending this alternative to voters who, in the past, might have been turned away. As Bartlett correctly estimated, about 70 percent of provisional ballots were judged valid.
Election machinery. To paraphrase the Apollo 13 Commander: Raleigh, we have a problem. Much of the pre-election and on-going debate over election reform has pointed to the voting machines themselves. Newer, electronic machines sometimes do not offer a paper ballot, or “paper trail,” that election officials can track if the machinery breaks down.
To much embarrassment, a now infamous electronic device in Carteret County had a problem. The machine was wrongly calibrated to hold far fewer than the 10,000 votes it was supposed to count. When the machine’s warning light flashed that it was full, no one saw it and some 4,438 votes never were computed because there was no paper backup.
It is this breakdown that has delayed the result in the Agriculture Commissioner’s race in which fewer than 3,000 votes separate incumbent Democrat Britt Cobb and Republican challenger Steve Troxler, who leads. The State Board of Elections ruled that there were not enough votes to change the outcome of the next closest Council of State race and the Board declared Democrat June Atkinson the winner over Republican Bill Fletcher by some 8,500 votes.
Those watchdogs who want machines to provide a paper trail will point to the Carteret County experience as evidence for their argument. The state of Nevada adopted a law requiring such machines, so the technology exists.
Human error. Ah yes, the human error, like the poor, will always be with us. There were a handful of notable human mistakes: There were mix-ups in Mecklenburg County early votes, enough to change the outcome in several county commissioner races. Yadkin and Craven county officials counted some votes twice.
The biggest foul-up was in Gaston County. About 12,000 early votes were misplaced and not counted in its initial returns and further examination by Charlotte Observer reporters showed discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters signing in to vote.
These flaws require attention. Most of them can be fixed without drastic measures or legislation. For example, adding more early voting stations will reduce the bottlenecks. The debate over “paper trail” voting machines is not over, and a solution would be expensive- but not impossible.
North Carolina’s elections attracted national attention and derision, especially from MSNBC’s Keith Olberman. Given the overconfidence of some, including this writer, that nothing would go wrong, it is a lesson in pride going before the fall.
What is cause for pride, however, is that in all of the problems cited, none were caused by cheating or fraud. At the end of the day, North Carolina had good, clean elections.
Barlow Herget is a former Raleigh city councilman and writes the Follow the Money column for the N.C. Center for Voter Education.
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