Brianna Kraemer
Carolina Journal
Less than 50 days out from Election Day, county Boards of Elections across North Carolina are hustling to conduct accuracy testing on tabulator machines while preparing a new batch of absentee ballots for distribution in the next week.
North Carolina election officials have been balancing the demands of destroying tens of thousands of ballots, reordering thousands more, and testing tabulator machines that will be used at voting sites across the state.
With roughly 850,000 registered voters, Wake County holds the largest number of registered voters in the state. Over 20,000 ballots have been shredded following the state Supreme Court’s order to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the presidential ticket. In response to the change, the Wake County Board has hired about 50 additional workers to prepare outgoing ballots under a tight deadline, Wake County Board of Elections Director Olivia McCall told the Carolina Journal.
During a tour of the Raleigh facility, she said the county would typically have 15-20 people working to label, fill, audit, and seal outgoing ballots, but they currently have 70 staff members working in an assembly-line-type fashion to get the job done. According to the North Carolina Board of Elections, military and overseas ballots (UOCAVA) will go out this Friday, and civilian absentee ballots will go out next Tuesday.
Just down the hall at the elections training center, close to 4,000 tabulator machines are being tested to ensure they read every part of the ballot accurately. In Wake County, all ballots are paper and must be run through the DS-200 machine, which has been in use since 2019. The process, known as Logic and Accuracy Testing (L&A), started last week and is expected to run for three more weeks.
Workers insert marked, test ballots by hand into every tabulator that will be used for early voting, Election Day, or to count absentee-by-mail or provisional ballots. The results from the ballots are recorded on a memory device in the tabulator, which is then compared to the paper tape results and the original test script used to mark the ballots. In order for the machines to pass the test, the results must match exactly for the test to be successful, or else they will need to start from scratch and recode the machine.
L&A testing is open to the public in an effort to provide transparency to voters. The staff working with the tabulator machines wear colored vests indicating the political party they affiliate with to openly display that the process is conducted by a bipartisan group of workers.
“We often use the colored vests during Logic and Accuracy Testing and during our Sample Hand Eye Count, as a visual representation of our bipartisan efforts for transparency in the election process,” Director McCall explained. “If UNAs should ever be brought in, the vests would be yellow.”
Jim Womack, Chairman of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, maintains ongoing concerns about election vulnerabilities. While the L&A testing ensures the machine is
counting ballots correctly, Womack noted that it does not rule out cybersecurity problems.
“The Logic and Accuracy testing that’s done on the machines is not a cybersecurity check. It is not, and it is in no way, a confidence builder for people like me that the machines are not going to be exploited,” said Womack. “In fact, logic and accuracy testing only proves that the machine – like a handheld calculator – can count and balance effectively. That’s really all the L&A does.”
Womack also expressed concern over the lack of scrutiny for absentee ballots cast by UOCAVA voters, explaining that these voters, often not military personnel, face lower levels of verification compared to in-person or other absentee voters.
After election concerns grew following the 2020 election, Director McCall said public engagement increased, with more groups expressing curiosity about the process, attending board meetings, and receiving an influx of public records requests.
“In response to this, we have expanded our outreach efforts to get out into the community and create more opportunities for the public to learn about and build trust in the election process. Transparency is a great way for counties to showcase their election efforts and for the public to see the laws being followed,” she added.
The public can participate in the process by becoming a Precinct Official, attending Board Meetings, viewing public Logic and Accuracy Testing, or utilizing the customer support team.
“For us, we are not just working behind the scenes; we actively involve the community in the entire process.”
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