Overview of some problems in North Carolina
Voter intimidation and mistreatment:- Even before Election Day, early voting procedures generated controversy. In Mecklenburg county, the majority-Republican Board of Commissioners voted against accepting a $55,000 grant from the State Board of Elections to facilitate early voting on a Sunday, because they feared it would give partisan advantage to the Democrats.
- Given that a number of black churches were known to be planning a ìSouls to the Pollsî effort after the service that Sunday, some observers claimed that the Commissionersí actions had a racist dimension.
- On November 2, signs at certain precincts warned voters they had only five minutes to complete their ballots. There is no legal time limit for completing ballots.
- In Mecklenburg County, voters whose names were not on the voter rolls were not given provisional ballots when they should have been. One voter was escorted out of a polling place, rather than being given a provisional ballot, because he was not on the voting list.
- Students in Winston-Salem were turned away from polling places
after being told that their university issued IDs were not valid forms
of identification.
Vote counting problems:
- The biggest failure occurred when over 4000 votes were ìlostî without any hope of recovery in Carteret county, after the company responsible for providing the voting machines led local officials to believe they could store more votes than was in fact the case.
- In Yadkin, Mecklenburg and Craven Counties, machine problems meant that ballots were thousands of counted twice, although the problem was later corrected.
- The vote tabulation machine used in Guilford County had memory capacity problems, which led it initially to ignore 6,000 to 20,000 ballots. This problem was also corrected.
- Officials in Gaston County took six days to realize that they had failed to count 90% of early and absentee ballots, along with all ballots from one entire precinct.
- A problem with ballot-counting software in Onslow County led to incorrect vote totals being recorded. Redoing the count changed the order in which the top five vote getters finished, although it did not affect who won election.
- One of the electronic voting machines in Pender County broke down and the votes that it had recorded had to be totaled manually. In another precinct, a poll-worker error affecting voting machines led the county board of elections to keep polls open one hour longer than expected.