Guilford official: Berger election protest claim ‘highly unlikely’

Guilford County’s elections director says it is “highly unlikely” that voters eligible to cast ballots in last month’s Senate District 26 Republican primary didn’t get the proper ballot.

County elections director Charlie Collicutt offered that assessment in a one-page memo Friday.

Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, filed an election protest after the March 3 primary suggesting eight Guilford County voters eligible to vote in the District 26 primary didn’t receive the proper ballot.

The issue became moot on March 24 when Berger conceded the election to Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, who won the race in the Rockingham and Guilford County district by 23 votes.

Collicutt’s memo, sent to Guilford and state elections board members and state elections staff, addresses issues raised in Berger’s protest.

“Specifically, there were allegations that certain candidates and the Republican North Carolina Senate District 26 contest did not appear on the ballots of voters eligible for those contests, and this was due to errors by precinct officials,” Collicutt wrote. “Guilford County has multiple NC Senate Districts, and some ballots included this contest, while others did not.”

“The purpose of this document is to discuss our site procedures and elaborate on certain reconciliation process noted at the time of the allegations, and further reconciliations of our ballot tabulation in our post-canvass processes,” the memo continued.

“First, each early voting site in Guilford is equipped with at least one laptop computer and barcode scanner system that is used to ensure that each voter is given the proper ballot style,” Collicutt wrote. “A voter’s Authorization to Vote has a barcode that simply contains the ballot style assigned to the voter. Each ballot has a similar barcode, which just contains the ballot style (for example, R021 or D012). Before handing the voter a ballot, each barcode is scanned by the precinct official.  If the barcodes match, the system produces a voice prompt indicating a ballot style match.”

“Despite this, there could still be a precinct official error that led a voter to be provided with the wrong ballot style,” the memo explained.

“During our canvass period, I was able to determine the number of voters who should have been provided with a ballot with NC Senate District 26 from our early voting management system,” Collicutt wrote. “I was successfully able to reconcile this number with the number of ballots cast into the early voting tabulators that contained the NC Senate District 26 contest. With this result, we know that there were no ballot distribution errors, or there were an equal number of offsetting errors – where NC Senate District 26-eligible voters were provided ballots omitting NC Senate District 26 and the same number of NC Senate District 26-ineligible voters were provided with a ballot including NC Senate District 26.” 

“Finally, after the final certification of the election, there is a 30-day sort process where early voting ballots are hand-sorted into their precinct group, and retabulated so that data can be provided at the precinct level instead of all grouped as one early voting result,” Collicutt explained. “After this process, we were able to reconcile the voters eligible for NC Senate District 26 with ballots cast that contained Senate District 26. Though similar to the reconciliation illustrated above, this precinct level reconciliation is conducted on smaller groupings of ballots – 165 precincts – that would more easily demonstrate the offsetting error dilemma.”

“For the reasons described here, I feel confident that the irregularities noted in the protest allegations are highly unlikely to have occurred at the Guilford County early voting sites,” Collicutt concluded.

“Guilford official: Berger election protest claim ‘highly unlikely’” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.