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North Carolina elections board certifies primary results

The North Carolina Board of Elections on Thursday certified the results of the state's May 17 primary and municipal elections following audit by "bipartisan teams at all 100 county boards of elections."

Posted Updated
Voting in Raleigh
By
Paul Specht
, WRAL State Government Reporter

North Carolina's primary election results are final.

The North Carolina Board of Elections on Thursday said it certified the results of the state's May 17 primary and municipal elections following audit by "bipartisan teams at all 100 county boards of elections."

Election officials since 2020 have faced intense scrutiny from supporters of former President Donald Trump who believe his defeat was fraudulent. Skeptics filed dozens of complaints and lawsuits alleging that votes were altered or somehow fraudulent were dismissed due to a lack of evidence.

Since then, North Carolina's elections board has tried to be more transparent about how the state's election processes work. The state elections board's announcement about the primary results being certified included an explanation of how election workers search for irregularities.

Poll workers for each of the state's 100 county boards of elections conducted hand counts of ballots among randomly selected ballot groups: ballots cast at one or more precincts, early voting sites, or by-mail. In these 200 groups of ballots, poll workers found "very small differences between machine counts and human hand-eye counts were found in 21 samples among 17 counties," the board said.

"Most of these minor discrepancies can be attributed to human errors during the hand-eye audit itself, or to voters who circle bubbles instead of filling them in or mark the bubble too lightly so it can’t be read by the machine," it said. "In other words, in 179 of 200 samples, the hand and machine counts were identical."

The board says it also verified that the same number of voters who check in to vote at polling places matches the number of physical ballots tabulated by each county board of elections.

Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said in a statement that the audit results show "our certified voting machines count ballots accurately and can be trusted."

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