Counties miss vote reporting deadline

N.C. totals late for 1st time ever, due to flood of provisional ballots

MICHELLE CROUCH  Charlotte Observer   10 November 2004

For the first time in state history, North Carolina didn't have official election results on time because several counties were still counting when the deadline passed at midnight Tuesday, state officials said.

Catawba and Wake counties told the state elections board Tuesday morning they simply couldn't finish counting all their provisional ballots in time. Those ballots are cast by voters who could not be found in registration books on Election Day.

Four other counties Mecklenburg, New Hanover, Lee and Randolph were still counting as of 10:30 p.m. Tuesday.

All hope to finish by today.

The delay leaves two close Council of State races without a winner for yet another day. The races for agriculture commissioner and superintendent of public instruction both had a margin of fewer than 7,000 votes Tuesday evening, and thousands of provisional votes remained uncounted.

Those races could force a new statewide election if the margins remain slim after all counties report, because machines in coastal Carteret County irretrievably lost more than 4,500 votes. One expert called it one of the worst Election Day snafus in the country.

About 75,000 voters statewide cast provisional ballots this year, more than double the number four years ago, said Gary Bartlett, executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections.

The jump was partly due to increased turnout and a concerted effort by voter-turnout groups to remind people of the right to vote provisionally. But the biggest factor, Bartlett said, was a new state law that guaranteed people the right to vote outside their local precincts.

Ballots from those voters take election officials extra time to review because they first have to check the voter's eligibility, then throw out the votes for any races the voter was not eligible to participate in.

"It's a time-consuming, manual process," Bartlett said.

In Mecklenburg County, for example, the Board of Elections spent about seven hours Tuesday simply deciding the eligibility of its 6,227 provisional voters. They checked signatures, spot-checked some voter registrations and addressed concerns from candidates and party lawyers.

At 8:15 p.m., they started opening envelopes that contained the ballots of eligible voters, determining what races they were qualified to participate in and adding those votes to the totals. They predicted it would be at least another few hours before they had official results.

In Catawba County, workers reviewed 1,480 provisional ballots this year, compared with the 200 or 300 typically cast, said Elections Director Larry Brewer.

Despite working evenings and through the weekend, staff still had 100 left to research Tuesday afternoon, Brewer said. He hoped to finish Tuesday night so he could turn them over to the local elections board by midmorning today.

Most N.C. counties have electronic voting machines that show only one ballot with the races for one precinct, Bartlett said. But new, more sophisticated equipment has the power to change the ballot based on where the voter lives. That would speed up the process of counting provisional votes, Bartlett said, because it wouldn't have to be done by hand.

Mecklenburg County already has 97 of the machines, which it used for its early voting this year.

More than $50 million in federal grant money could help counties afford more of the machines, Bartlett said. The state elections board will decide how to spend that money.

Some provisional ballots are cast by people who didn't report a new address or name change to election officials. Others came from voters who went to the wrong precinct. And a few were voters who registered by mail but did not have the required identification when they arrived at their precincts.

Typically, about 70 percent of provisional ballots are deemed eligible, and their votes are added to the total.