State elections officials on Wednesday rejected a request by state Senate leader Phil Berger to use new rules for the recount process, as he seeks to defend the seat he’s held in the state legislature for nearly three decades.<\/p>\n
Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page challenged Berger for his seat in this month\u2019s Republican Party primary. Initial results show Page ahead by 23 votes. But the result hasn\u2019t yet been made final because Berger requested a recount.<\/p>\n
While the recount process is underway, Berger had asked state officials to go outside the normal process and single out 220 specific ballots for special attention. On Wednesday they demurred, saying they don’t think they have the legal authority to do what Berger wants. It was a bipartisan decision.<\/p>\n
“It can’t be done in the state of North Carolina,” Republican board member Angela Hawkins said. “We can’t address those.”<\/p>\n
“We’re going to let the normal process play itself out, and not do anything special,” Democratic board member Siobhan Millen said.<\/p>\n
It’s possible Berger could now sue, to try to convince a judge to force the elections board to take up his request. Other legal fights have already begun in this race; Berger also\u00a0filed legal protests<\/a>\u00a0over 13 ballots on Tuesday. Those protests will wind through the system separately from the recount process.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the meantime, though, it’s still possible the ballots he wants examined will be looked at in a later stage of the recount process. It’s just not guaranteed to happen at this point, due to the rules for how recounts work in North Carolina.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tHow recounts work<\/p>\n In North Carolina, recounts work<\/a> under highly specific rules. The first step is a machine recount in which ballots are fed through vote-counting machines a second time to double-check the initial results. There are also two kinds of \u201chand-to-eye\u201d recounts, in which election officials can go through the ballots one by one to tally them up.<\/p>\n On Tuesday Berger sent a letter<\/a> to State Elections Director Sam Hayes asking for a hybrid type of recount that isn\u2019t articulated under state law.<\/p>\n Berger said his campaign has identified 220 ballots, cast by local voters, in which people weren\u2019t recorded as voting in every race on the ballot. As both counties conduct their machine recounts, Berger is asking that they also pull out the 220 individual ballots in question to more closely examine them by hand \u2014 to determine if the voters did just skip some of the races, or if some of their votes weren\u2019t recorded due to an error.<\/p>\n Since the number of ballots he identified is greater than the margin separating Page and Berger, Berger wrote to Hayes, a closer examination of those ballots \u201ccould very likely determine the outcome of this race.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s no specific process in place for the state to single out specific ballots to examine by hand like Berger wants to happen. It\u2019ll be up to state officials to decide \u2014 possibly at Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u2014 if they want to grant Berger\u2019s request anyway.<\/p>\n Page has previously raised concerns<\/a> with these post-election processes being handled by the State Board of Elections, noting that its work is overseen by Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Berger ally<\/a>. Page wants Boliek to distance himself from the process.<\/p>\n Boliek endorsed Berger and campaigned with him in Rockingham County ahead of the March 3 primary. “That just shows a total conflict of interest,\u201d Page said of Boliek.<\/p>\n Boliek has declined to recuse himself<\/a>, saying he doesn\u2019t have a vote on decisions made by the State Board of Elections. Boliek appoints the members of the state and county election boards who take those votes. He also runs oversight of county election boards<\/a> out of his office. But Boliek isn\u2019t personally tasked with making decisions on recounts, election protests or similar issues.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s nothing to recuse myself from,\u201d Boliek told WRAL.<\/p>\n Even if the state board votes Wednesday to decline to approve the hybrid recount Berger wants, that won\u2019t necessarily stop Berger from requesting a hand-to-eye recount.<\/p>\n Two types of hand-to-eye recounts exist. First, officials take a random sampling of 3% of all the ballots cast, review them, and tabulate any differences in the vote count. It\u2019s then possible \u2014 but not guaranteed \u2014 to do a full hand recount of every ballot cast.<\/p>\n State law says that full hand-to-eye recount can only be ordered if the partial recount identifies enough changes to the vote count that there\u2019s a mathematical indication that a full recount could change the outcome of the race.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf the results of the hand\u2011to\u2011eye recount differ from the previous results within those precincts to the extent that extrapolating the amount of the change to the entire jurisdiction (based on the proportion of ballots recounted to the total votes cast for that office) would result in the reversing of the results, then the State Board shall order a hand\u2011to\u2011eye recount of the entire jurisdiction in which the election is held,\u201d state law says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"State elections officials on Wednesday rejected a request by state Senate leader Phil Berger to use new rules…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":664864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[148913,50,134552,65762,228755,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-664863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","category-us","tag-nccapitol","tag-news","tag-phil-berger","tag-sam-page","tag-state-board-of-elections","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116251251634996038","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}