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North Carolina Supreme Court Race [1]

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Date: 2025-04-27

I've been following the reporting on this story, and there's one aspect of it that really baffles me. Even if Griffin wins, and the court directs that all the challenged ballots must be cured, how can votes that have already been counted in a secret ballot be deducted from the totals?



I don't know exactly how North Carolina's voting systems works, but I've worked for dozens of elections in South Carolina, with three different types of voting machines. It might seem that with the current equipment, which implements a voter-verified paper audit trail, paper ballots cast by specific voters could be identified after they've been counted. The voting process as I understand it, however, is designed to make that impossible. Each voter is issued a blank paper ballot when they check in. All of these blank ballots are identical. The voter then takes the ballot to a ballot marking machine where she makes her choices. Once those choices are printed on the paper ballot, the voter has the opportunity to review her ballot before taking it to another machine where it is counted. Once counted, each ballot goes into a bin with those from every other voter at that polling location. All the ballots for a given polling location may be recounted, either by machine or by hand, but there is no way for a particular ballot to be identified as having been cast by a specific voter.



I should qualify this last statement, since within a given polling location there may be multiple precincts or even voting districts, e.g. for local government races, within a single precinct. Each different combination of precincts and districts would require a different "ballot style," and it would be possible to associate each voter with her specific ballot style. However, unless a voter were the only one in her precinct voting a particular ballot style, which is highly unlikely, her ballot could not be identified after being counted.



Even for challenge and provisional ballots, which a voter fills out by hand, ballot secrecy is maintained by putting the completed ballot in an inner envelope before enclosing it in an outer envelope with the voter's identifying information on the outside. The election board then decides whether to count the ballot based on the qualifications of the voter. If it is decided that the ballot should be counted, the inner envelope containing the provisional ballot is removed from the outer envelope and placed with other approved provisional ballots. At this point, there is no way to connect any specific voter with her ballot. When all the approved provisional ballots have been collected, the inner envelopes are opened and the votes are counted.



I'd be very surprised to learn that North Carolina does not have similar procedures for maintaining ballot secrecy. If they do, it doesn't seem to me possible to undo votes that have already been counted. What is even more surprising to me is that none of the reporting I read or heard on this issue even mentions this. Is Griffin proposing that the voters who fail to "cure" their ballots be canvased to see which candidate received their invalid votes? If so, wouldn't that just be giving those voters a chance to effectively vote twice, by saying they voted for the candidate they actually voted against? Or perhaps he's asking a portion of each candidates votes to be invalidated based simply on the ratio of voters who fail to cure. That might explain why he has only asked for votes in Democratic leaning districts to be invalidated. Or maybe he wants to run DNA and fingerprint analysis on all the ballots to match them to the voters who were disqualified...



In any case, I'd be very interested if anyone could shed some light on this conundrum.



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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/27/2319101/-North-Carolina-Supreme-Court-Race?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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