RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — More people voted in the 2024 election than any other election in North Carolina history, and on Tuesday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections met to certify the results of races that are not in the recount process.
Before the board certified the results, state elections director Karen Brinson Bell talked about steps both state and county election officials took to ensure the accuracy of those results.
“We did a series of queries to identify possible early voters and absentee voters who cast ballots in the election, but may not have been eligible,” she said.
Officials also compared some machine vote counts to hand counts and checked that the number of voters matched the number of ballots cast. In the majority of counties, Brinson Bell said those numbers varied by five or fewer votes.
She said discrepancies were generally due to situations such as people accidentally putting a provisional ballot in a tabulator or leaving a polling place without voting.
“In one county they had nine voters who checked in and then walked out without casting their ballot. That’s particularly high,” she said. “In reviewing this and understanding what those differences were, we find no evidence of vote totals or ballots cast being manipulated,” she added.
The board certified all elections that are not in the process of a recount. Recounts continue for a North Carolina Supreme Court race as well as several legislative races.
“We are in the process of a machine recount where we feed all the ballots back through and check the totals for those contests, and then potentially we could go into a sampling where we will hand count ballots based upon a random selection, and potentially it could even go into a phase where we would hand count all ballots,” Brinson Bell explained.
She emphasized that the process is time-consuming.
“The reason why the recounts are still going is because we had such a tremendous turnout,” she said. “We had 5.7 million ballots cast in North Carolina and those are all being fed in individually through tabulators.”
According to a spokesperson for the State Board of Elections, Wilson County must redo its recount due to technical issues with the first recount. That is expected to take place on Monday.