A concern troll in a local Facebook forum fretted yesterday about “those responsible for counting ballots,” about the “temptation for cheating,” and about observers “denied access to vote counting areas.” Do poll officials act “with integrity”? Clearly someone spending too much time listening to the wrong people online who know too little and are easily misled.
Coincidentally, this USA Today story about election integrity popped up from coastal North Carolina:
The integrity of the 2020 election became especially personal for Brunswick County Elections Director Sara Knotts on Nov. 13 when she had to ask her elections board to reject her mother’s ballot.
Knotts felt obligated to do this because her mother had submitted an absentee ballot in September, then died on Oct. 11, several weeks before the Nov. 3 Election Day.
North Carolina election law requires voters to be alive on Election Day. This includes voters who cast their ballots early by mail-in absentee ballot or via in-person early voting.
The Brunswick County Board of Elections voted unanimously to remove the absentee ballot of 62-year-old Anne Ashcraft of Winnabow because she was deceased as of Nov. 3 and therefore not qualified to participate in the election.
Do dead people vote? In every election! Just as Anne Ashcraft did. In some states those votes still count. Just not here. (I lost an aunt in the Midwest to old age just before the election; her absentee vote did not count either.)
People who run elections here are top-notch. People who work Election Day polls do it to give back to the community. You can’t pry them out of those jobs until they themselves give out. They don’t do it for the money. Their work is a source of pride.
And by the way, vote-counting is done by machine here and backed up by random hand-counted audits overseen by bipartisan teams. Same for full hand-recounts performed after machine recounts. Initial recounts are done by machine to look for discrepancies.
Are mistakes made? In what human endeavor are they not?
When the Brunswick County Board of Elections took up Ashcraft’s ballot on Friday, Knotts stepped aside and had another elections staff person present the case.
Board members on Friday praised Knotts for her honesty just before they took the vote.
This is what integrity looks like. For real. It is far more prevalent than conspiracists suppose.