Half of registered Republicans voters in North Carolina have little or no confidence that the votes in the 2024 election will be counted accurately, revealing a sharp divide with Democrats and unaffiliated voters in the state.

One in five Republicans have “no confidence” that the election results will be accurate, according to a new WRAL News Poll of 676 likely voters in North Carolina conducted in partnership with independent pollster SurveyUSA. Another 30% have “little confidence” in the accuracy of the results.

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Almost nine in 10 registered Democrats have some or full confidence in the accuracy of the results and 68% of unaffiliated voters expressed some or full confidence compared to 46% of Republicans.

Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both statehouse chambers. They also control most of the seats on the state Supreme Court as well as both U.S. Senate seats. The state has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in nine of the past 10 elections.

Current and former elections officials say North Carolina has taken numerous steps, some going far beyond other states, to ensure election security and accuracy.

“North Carolina voters should feel confident that North Carolina elections are secure,” said Katelyn Love, former general counsel for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

But Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who carried the state in 2016 and 2020, contends the 2020 election was stolen and routinely makes allegations of impropriety surrounding voting and ballot counting, leading to distrust in the system among members of his party. Such claims led supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, hoping to “stop the steal” and disrupt the state-by-state certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

In the WRAL poll, 54% of likely Trump voters said they have little or no confidence in the election accuracy. That’s up from 44% in WRAL’s March poll.

“What we see today is a group of people who are saying, before the election even happens, that they don’t trust the outcome,” said Jason Roberts, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The WRAL News Poll results are consistent with other polling on the topic. A poll from Catawba College in Salisbury and YouGov found that voters have more confidence in elections closer to home with 75% confident votes will be counted correctly in their county but just 61% confident that votes will be counted correctly in other states. A recent Elon poll found 24% of Republicans are willing to trust the results of the election, compared to 74% of Democrats.

Ensuring accuracy

In North Carolina, election equipment is not connected to the internet to protect against a cyberattack or interference. Counties maintain a paper trail of every vote cast. The results are subject to numerous audits that are required by law.

“There is a canvass process which is dictated by law so that the county boards of elections and the State Board have to account for everything that happened in the election,” Love said. “They have to reconcile the number of ballots cast with the number of votes cast.”

If those numbers don’t match up, they must research and provide an explanation for why. Some voters skip races. In rare cases, voters leave with their ballot. Sometimes voters vote a blank ballot.

County boards will select certain voting sites for hand counts after the election, an arduous process that is mandated by state law.

Before elections, county officials test the voting machines, running ballots through them and then compare the tabulations to the actual votes. It’s called logic-and-accuracy testing.

“We will make sure that if there’s anything that comes up that is not the predicted outcome, when we see something, we’re going to troubleshoot that with the machine,” said Olivia McCall, director of the Wake County Board of Elections.

After the vote, Wake County maintains custody logs to know exactly how and where ballots are transported from and to.

Elections officials and political scientists say North Carolina voters should volunteer as poll workers on Election Day or attend canvassing meetings at county boards to gain a deeper understanding of the checks and balances in the system and to see their fellow citizens work to keep elections safe and accurate.

The state board has a dedicated investigative arm and a website that details its efforts to “ensure your vote counts.” But it’s clear that not all of those efforts are known by the public.

More than 50% of North Carolinians are not aware that a system tracks the status of their mail-in ballot, that the state prevents the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots or that equipment is not connected to the internet, according to the Catawba College poll.

Additionally, North Carolina keeps open records of nearly every part of the election process, allowing partisans, journalists, citizens and others interested in the process to conduct their own research.

“North Carolina has the best data transparency in the country on our elections and our election outcomes,” said Roberts, the UNC professor. “You can look up voting results, you can look up voter registration, you can look up your voter history. All of it’s right there for anyone with a computer to look at. And that kind of transparency should instill confidence in our elections.”

Court fights

What does not instill confidence, some said, are changes to election laws and legal challenges. The Democrat-led State Board of Elections recently faced political pressure and court challenges over its delayed decisions to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s We The People Party and Cornel West’s Justice For All Party on the ballot. Then the state Supreme Court overturned the board’s decision to keep the We The People Party on the ballot, leading to a delay in the start of mail-in voting.

The board is facing new lawsuits from Republicans, alleging problems with voting machines and voter registration rolls. The board also had to settle issues over what types of identification to allow to comply with voter ID laws.

“It’s not surprising that North Carolinians are concerned about how our elections are conducted,” said Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, chairman of the committee on elections and redistricting. “We have a State Board of Elections that has repeatedly acted in a partisan manner and gone as far as changing the rules for the election while voting was taking place. North Carolina needs a truly bipartisan board of elections.”

The state board is controlled by the governor’s political party in a 3-2 split. Currently there are three Democrats on the board.

Legislative Republicans passed a bill that would require the state board and all county board of elections to be split evenly among Republicans and Democrats and appointed, not by the governor, but by the legislature.

If the evenly-split board could not come to a consensus on early voting sites, the county would be limited to one site. If they could not come to a consensus on certifying an election, even a presidential election, it would revert to the legislature.

In March, a three-judge panel overturned the law saying it infringed upon the governor’s constitutional duties.

"So now our elections are administered by a board whose majority is handpicked by Kamala Harris' top cheerleader,” Daniel said of Cooper, a close ally of the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee. “We're two months out from the election, and the state Supreme Court just ruled that the board tried to deny voters their fundamental right to vote by knowingly sending out inaccurate and misleading ballots."

Republicans argued the board should have allowed Kennedy, who has endorsed Trump, to get off the North Carolina ballot. Of course, the parties — and the board majority — took the opposite positions when Kennedy was trying to get on the ballot.

Those types of partisan actions or actions perceived as partisan pose issues for elections and trust in elections.

“The politicization of elections is a significant threat to elections in general,” Love said. “Decisions are not being made for the right reasons when elections are politicized. Legal changes in the elections law regime have become very commonplace and similarly there are numerous court challenges that take place every year just related to North Carolina elections. And all of those changes lead to the public to have less confidence in the elections because they don’t understand what the rules are. If the rules are always changing, it’s very confusing.”

The criticism of elections and election officials by Republicans are having an impact on public opinion and behavior, especially among their own voters. Throughout the 2020 election cycle, for example, Trump made claims about fraud in mail-in ballots. Nearly 700,000 North Carolinians voted by mail for Biden, while under 278,000 voted for Trump using mail.

As of May, Trump had accused Democrats or others more than 500 times of trying to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the 2024 election, according to The New York Times.

Twenty-one percent of those who identified as “very conservative” in the WRAL News Poll said they have “no confidence” in accuracy of the election, the highest total for any subgroup in the survey. Those who identified as “liberal” and “very liberal” were the most likely to express “full confidence” in election accuracy.

“This is driven by elites in the Republican Party who are telling their voters this,” Roberts said. “Most people don’t have a great idea of how their elections are run. They’re not in the election office. They’re not seeing day-to-day operations and so they just probably assume they’re fine until their leaders tell them they’re not. And then they don’t have any reason to not believe that.”

The WRAL News Poll was conducted between Sept. 4 and Sept. 7 and has a credibility interval of 4.9 percentage points. A credibility interval is similar to a margin of error but takes into account more factors and is considered by some pollsters to be a more accurate measurement of statistical certainty.

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