NC Trusted Elections Tour addresses voting laws and election security

Editor’s Note: This article was reported and written before Tropical Storm Helene.

If you get dizzy keeping track of the number of races during election season, you’re not alone. From gubernatorial candidates to Asheville City Council candidates, there is a lot of homework for voters to do for the 2024 races.

This year, the League of Women Voters Asheville-Buncombe County is co-hosting the NC Trusted Elections Tour, a series of voter education events organized by the N.C. Democracy Resilience Network at The Carter Center. The tour came to Weaverville on Aug. 20 and featured Buncombe County Election Services Director Corrine Duncan and Buncombe County Board of Elections Chair Jake Quinn. They answered questions about the election process and new voting-related laws that residents may be encountering for the first time.

“We know that voters are often confused, and that can lead to uncertainty and distrust,” explains Jennifer Roberts of the Carter Center, who organized the N.C. Trusted Elections Tour with retired N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr. The tour is “using town halls to have the actual election directors, who run your elections, administer the ballots, count the ballots, secure the ballots … explain changes that happened, but also explain the safety and security of every ballot in North Carolina,” Roberts says.

Roberts and League of Women Voters of Asheville-Buncombe County President Suzanne Fisher spoke with Xpress about the election laws that voters should know, guarantees about ballot privacy and resources to learn more about candidates.

This interview has been condensed for length and edited for clarity.

Xpress: The Trusted Elections Tour is visiting 28 locations across the state until Election Day. What questions are people asking? 

Jennifer Roberts: On college campuses, we see students come — a lot of first-time presidential voters. Sometimes they’re from out of state. They need to understand what allows them to register in North Carolina, how they would do that, and how they can’t vote in two places, obviously. … If they’re living in North Carolina, and they want to vote here and they’re a resident here, then they can register.

They have a lot more questions than some of the older folks. The older folks may have more questions about the security [of ballot counting] and about recent changes in the law.

What do you see causing confusion for voters this election cycle? 

Suzanne Fisher: The need for voter ID. [Voters were required to show ID] in the primary, but a lot more people are going to be voting this fall, so it’s new to people.

Absentee ballots [are also confusing]. During the pandemic, you only needed one signature; now we’re back to [requiring] two signatures. You have to put a copy of your ID in a certain place and there are different envelopes and things. … If you’re [voting by] absentee now, the ballot has to be there on Election Day — there’s no more grace period.

JR: When we look at requirements for other states, [North Carolina has] the most restrictive ballot requirement for mail-in ballots, [requiring] two signatures and the photo ID, and you’ve got to put the address of your witnesses. And they actually check those addresses in many counties. They’re doing a pilot program on signature matching, so we are definitely secure.

The concern that we heard on the election commission — which is 65 people from all across the state, left, right, center, Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated — the concern is that access is sometimes a challenge for voters in North Carolina.

(Editor’s note: In the wake of Tropical Storm Helene, a number of emergency measures have been approved by the N.C. State Board of Elections (NCSBE). As Carolina Public Press has reported, “Voters themselves can return absentee ballots in person on Election Day, while that was previously only allowed during early voting. They may return them to any county Board of Elections or the NCSBE by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day, and those boards will deliver them to the correct Board of Elections by the day before the election canvass, where official results are tallied.” For more, visit avl.mx/e7z.)

Can you elaborate? What are the concerns about voter access during the 2024 election?

JR: In some smaller counties, there is only one early voting site. That could be at the Board of Elections [office], which could be a very far drive from some of the rural areas. So folks who don’t have transportation have a challenge. …. Many voters in North Carolina have some kind of disability — hearing, sight, physical, etc. Every polling site is supposed to have a curbside voting location. Again, in some places where it’s hard to get workers or the sites are hard to attain, that may not always happen.

And we also have seen early voting sites moved away from public transit. Sometimes they’ve been moved away from college campuses. Students don’t have cars. Those are some of the issues that we heard about.

Clearly, you can’t have early voting sites everywhere in your county. It costs a lot. But people are concerned that some of those hurdles are there, in addition to what we already talked about with absentee ballots and photo ID.

(Editor’s note: Following Tropical Storm Helene, the Buncombe County Board of Elections approved new times and locations for early voting. A full list of sites and times can be found at avl.mx/e80.) 

Have you seen an increased anxiety about election security over the past decade or two?

JR: Much of that has been driven by political purposes and by candidates trying to get an advantage. There is no concrete evidence of widespread fraud, hacking or attempts to subvert elections. [North Carolina] had one incident in 2018 with the 9th Congressional District, where there was ballot harvesting. (According to the Associated Press, in 2018 a political operative in Bladen County was linked to absentee ballot fraud. In light of fraud allegations, the State Board of Elections refused to certify his victory.) That was caught, and they redid the entire election because the results were compromised.

I don’t know what ballot harvesting is — can you explain it? 

JR: Ballot harvesting is when you get your campaign worker —  which is what happened in this case — to go to, say, an assisted living home and give all these people applications for absentee ballots [and change the votes to your preferred candidate or throw out ballots for the opposing candidate]. … Something happened in North Carolina, and people heard about it.

Some of the doubt started then. Some of it started in 2016.  Some of it started with more use of electronic marketing devices. People just don’t trust machines.

Yeah, a skepticism about voting machines makes some sense to me. 

JR: We’ve heard that a lot in these town halls. People are very happy that there’s a paper ballot backing up every single vote, and those ballots are stored. … If the website goes down, we still have the vote tallies and the vote results, because they’re on paper and they’re locked away.

Trust has decreased. Again, some of that is for political purposes with people who didn’t think they lost. …  It’s interesting — in one of the counties we were in, there was a board of elections member who [told us], “I had this candidate one year who said, ‘I can’t believe I lost. I don’t understand it. Everybody I spoke to said they were voting for me!” [laughs]

Can anyone search online and find out who you voted for? Or is your vote private? 

JR: People get confused because you can go to the state website and you can look up your name, and you can look up your party registration, and then it has all the times that you voted. Not how you voted. In a primary, it will say a Democratic primary, a Republican primary, but it will not say how you voted. … The private ballot, the secret ballot, is incredibly important. All the workers do an extra special job to keep that privacy.

Xpress published our 2024 voter guide on Oct. 9 with questionnaires from candidates in local races. But where can a voter learn more about the statewide races, such as for governor and superintendent of public instruction? 

SF: Vote411.org. … You put in your name and address, and it gives you all the information about when you can vote. It links you to the State Board of Elections website. It’s one-stop shopping to get all of that information.

It is legal to bring in a paper copy of your ballot to the polling place. On Vote 411, once you make your decisions, you can print it out. Because there are a lot of races, and you don’t want to be confused if you’ve done your research.