The John Locke Foundation published a research brief in February calling for North Carolina to adopt election performance audits (also called procedural audits). Audits that review the vote totals, while important, are insufficient:
Nevertheless, having matching sets of numbers does not, in itself, prove that election laws and procedures were followed or that results were not altered through malice or incompetence
The brief recommended three aspects of Utah’s election performance audits that North Carolina should emulate:
- It covers procedures during a two-year period, not just for individual elections.
- It was conducted by an outside entity.
- It includes responses from the state’s chief elections officer.
Independent election performance audits provide benefits that those across North Carolina’s political spectrum should support:
It would be more than recounting ballots to see that they match the original count and the number of voters (although that is a necessary step). It would also verify ballot and equipment chains of custody and that officials followed election law so that voters could have confidence that the entire process, from voter registration to the final ballot count, produced a “trustworthy record of voter intent…”
Both sides of the election security debate should support independent procedural audits. Those who do not trust election officials should welcome an independent body having the authority to “get a look under the hood” of how our elections are conducted. Likewise, those who believe elections in North Carolina are run well should welcome the opportunity to prove that through an outside audit. While nobody likes the idea of someone looking over your shoulder, I believe that election officials would benefit from an independent set of eyes seeing how they work, making suggestions to help them do their jobs better, and presenting the General Assembly with ideas to improve how elections are run in North Carolina.
New Hanover County violates state absentee ballot law
The New Hanover County Board of Elections “openly violated North Carolina law” during the 2024 election by not counting on election day all the absentee ballots they received before election day. In response to that and other problems at the board, the county hired a law firm to review what went wrong.
The firm produced its report in March. While the report indicated that election results were not altered, they found several problems with how the board conducted the election and made recommendations to correct those problems. One of those recommendations was to “conduct comprehensive audits.”
The report also mentioned that election board staff “refused to participate in our review.” They would be required to cooperate with an independent performance audit, which would make the resulting information more reliable.
Rockingham County loses a decade’s worth of campaign finance data
County election boards are supposed to retain data, including campaigns’ financial information. Rockingham County, north of Greensboro, has lost some of that data:
An investigator with the N.C. State Board of Elections will go to Rockingham County to investigate how decades’ worth of campaign finance reports went missing.
That announcement was made Friday afternoon by NCSBE Executive Director Sam Hayes. Hayes issued a new statement one day after a WBTV investigation into the fact that campaign finance reports for Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page are missing for any year before 2017.
The county board is also missing campaign finance reports for other candidate committees.
There is public interest in Page’s past fundraising because he is challenging Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger for the Republican nomination for Berger’s Senate seat in 2026.
Regular performance election audits can help county elections boards find and correct these kinds of problems before they become major issues. The General Assembly should implement them before the 2026 midterm elections.
