Electronic voting tampering is said to be unlikely here
March 26,2004
Sue Book
Sun Journal

The 2000 election debacles in Florida and Georgia shook some voters' confidence in the elections system, but North Carolina State Board of Elections Director Gary Bartlett said voters have been protected from similar events here since 1994.

The term "pregnant chad," which became common knowledge after Florida's 2000 presidential election, he said, was actually coined in North Carolina following a sixth district race for the U.S. House in the mid-1980s.

That possible error in counting the race between Republican Howard Coble and then Democratic incumbent Rep. Robin Britt prompted implementation of checks and balances that should reassure the state's voters, he said Thursday, following a State Board of Elections meeting at New Bern's Riverfront Convention Center in which further checks were approved.

Those 1994 safeguards are now tried and proven, said Bartlett, once in a Watauga County board race in which only eight votes separated the final two candidates. "On the recount, the apparent electronic vote loser won by two votes," he said.

So a manual hand/eye procedure recounted the vote again using a four-member team composed of two people from each party. The count of about 13,000 votes was done in a day and ended with a 10-vote difference and only three pregnant chads.

And the direct recording electronic voting machines have produced a calibration issue only once in Bartlett's 11-year tenure as director and that was during the absentee ballot period that allowed for correction before election day.

There are already safeguards in the system to allow for an automatic canvass by a county elections board composed of both Democratic and Republican parties as well as recounts should a candidate protest the outcome even in primaries or second primaries, he said.

If a new election is called, anyone eligible to vote can cast a ballot whether or not they did so in the first election, Bartlett said. All three major parties also allow unaffiliated voters to participate in their primary election.

Bartlett said he now also has board direction to administratively conduct a pilot study of data comparing the pre-election data base of direct recording electronic machines housed at the state board with the data base after the election to be sure it hasn't been altered.

Bartlett is confident North Carolina voters are safe in the ballots they cast and the accuracy of the results they bring.