NC counties close the books on 2022 elections
North Carolina counties are closing the books on the 2022 election.
Canvass day is when each county certifies the outcome of its election, 10 days after Election Day. It's a fairly lengthy process; every ballot has to be accounted for and the results have to be reconciled.
Once county canvasses are complete, the next step is at the state level. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has another ten days to review every county's results and look for any problems or discrepancies. The state board will meet Nov. 29 to certify the winners.
Wake County's elections director, Gary Sims, says it’s open to anyone, and people often come in to observe it.
"I think transparency is the biggest thing, you know. This is a public process," Sims said.
The day before the canvass, the bipartisan Wake County elections board met for nine hours to complete the needed tasks. That included inspecting and approving absentee ballots that were postmarked by Election Day, but that arrived between Election Day and the Monday deadline to receive them.
Sims said a few more might trickle in late if they were delayed in the mail, but they can't be counted if they weren't received by the deadline.
"Just about everything that was mailed on time will be counted, as long as it has the proper postmark," Sims said. "We got about 6,000 we're going to be adding to the count, just in absentee alone."
The board also reviews and approves provisional ballots. Those are ballots given to people who come to the wrong precinct to vote, or who believe they’re registered to vote but aren’t in the poll book, or for any other reason.
Provisional ballots are put into envelopes and kept separately from the rest of the ballots. Each one will be researched by election workers and cross-checked with DMV records to check the voter's eligibility.
Sims said about 3,900 such provisional votes were cast in Wake County this election. Of those, about 2,500 ballots were fully or partially counted, and about 1,400 were ineligible to be counted.
The additional absentee and provisional ballots didn’t change the outcome of any races in Wake County or even push any into recount territory, Sims said, but by law, every valid vote must be counted.
After every election, each county also conducts a sample hand-eye count of two voting precincts randomly chosen by the state elections board. Bipartisan teams of officials count the votes in the top race on the ballot.
"They will tally one by one to make sure that the votes that were tabulated in the tabulator match the hand eye count," Sims explained. "They always come out exactly the same, but it also allows for an extra layer of confidence the public can have that our voting system works."
Wake County completed its canvass Friday morning, with a unanimous vote of the board. Sims described the 2022 canvass as "one of the smoothest ever."
