Protest
We reported in Saturday's Greensboro edition of the paper (the story will run Monday in our High Point edition) that Trudy Wade has filed a protest in her loss to John Parks in the at-large County Commissioner race.
Wade held a 74-vote advantage when voters were tallied on election night. But that did not count more than 1,000 provisional ballots which would be tallied a week later. Those votes gave Parks a 242-vote win.
Wade's protest focuses on some of those provisional votes. Provisional ballots allow someone to cast their vote even when poll workers can't immediately determine whether they should be allowed to participate in the election on Election Day.
(For those who want to get into the nitty gritty: these electronic documents were provided by Wade's lawyers on Friday. They are in Microsoft Word format: A letter to Elections Director George Gilbert; the actual protest form prescribed by the state; and the addendum to that form, which really explains what's going on.
Between Election Day and the final canvas of results, election workers investigate each ballot to determine whether it should be counted. Only once election workers make the determination that a vote is legitimate do they open its envelope and run the paper ballot through a vote tabulator, similar to machines used to score standardized tests.
Why would someone's voter registration be in doubt? There are any number of reasons. One of the most common circumstances occurs when someone registers to vote at the same time they get their driver's license (under the motor voter law) but the DMV is too slow in forwarding his or her information on to the Board of Elections.
Wade's protest focuses on three different groups of provisional votes. The largest group consists of votes cast by people who live in Guilford County but submitted their provisional ballot at the wrong precinct polling place.
During the Board of Elections' canvass last week, the three-member panel voted to count those ballots for county-wide races, like Wade's, but not for district races, such as the District 7 race between Mike Barber and Mike Winstead.
Why might that be a problem?
At least one issue has to do with a conflict between North Carolina's voting laws and the federal Help America Vote Act, according to Gilbert. The federal law says that a voter shall be allowed to cast a vote if they are in the correct "jurisdiction," which has thus far been interpreted to mean the right county. The state law is stricter, specifying that voters cast their ballots in the right precinct.
The same issue is could come into play in the closely contested statewide race for Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Locally, the first step would be a preliminary hearing before the Guilford County Board of Elections. But don't be surprised if this case heads to court.
The new Guilford County Board of Commissioners is due to be sworn in Dec. 6.