Political enthusiasts in Alamance County may have been gritting their teeth on Tuesday as they waited for the local elections office to upload the results from this year’s general election.
Over the past decade or so, technological improvements and efficiencies at the state and local levels had gotten many area residents used to seeing early voting results pop up online right after the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. Then, as voters were still wrapping their heads around these partial returns, the Election Day figures began dribbling in and were soon available for public perusal from the N.C. Board of Elections.
This year proved something of a disappointment for many Alamance County residents, who saw nothing for nearly three hours after the polls closed on Tuesday. It was almost 10:30 p.m. when the N.C. Board of Elections released the first batch of results from Alamance County – and even then it was only a few thousand absentee ballots that had been mailed in before the election. It took until 12:14 a.m. on Wednesday for the remainder of the returns to appear on the state’s website.
The seemingly languid pace of this year’s returns was no bungle on the part of local officials, according to Dawn Hurdle, Alamance County’s elections director.
Hurdle contends that changes in state law as well as new protocols from the state board of elections led to inevitable delays in the release of vote totals on Tuesday.
“We follow the law and the state guidelines,” she went on to assert in an interview Wednesday, “and we have various regulations that we have to go by.”
Among other things, Hurdle noted that local elections officials could previously start tabulating early voting returns at 2:00 p.m. on Election Day, but now can’t begin the process until 7:30 p.m. She added that this postponement has ripple effects on ballots cast on Election Day, which can’t be tallied until the early votes are complete.
The actual wording of this state-level dictate suggests that local election officials are pretty much tied up with early voting returns even as Election Day results are piling up.
According to the operative state-level memo, the tabulation of early voting returns “is required to occur ‘at the time the polls close’ on Election Day,” meaning that “elections officials cannot ‘close the polls’ on early voting machines until 7:30 p.m.” that evening.
“Because this is a count of the ballots that will occur at the county board office,” the memo continues, “it must be in the presence or under the supervision of board members of all political parties then present.”
Hurdle acknowledged that, under the state’s current constraints, the local elections office wasn’t able to start sending the state either early voting or Election Day data until 10:17 p.m. The state, for its part, had the first batch of results available for viewing by 10:29 p.m. although it wasn’t until 14 minutes past midnight that the rest of the numbers were online.
Hurdle conceded that she isn’t sure how officials in other counties have fared under these new state procedures. The state board of elections nevertheless has some information on its election results “dashboard” that hints at the pace of vote tabulation in other jurisdictions.
Among the details in the dashboard’s county-specific results is the time that each local board made its final upload to the state. The dashboard retains no record of a county’s initial upload. Even so, the final upload provides some base of comparison and it varies considerably from county to county.
In Orange County, for instance, elections officials had the election’s results posted by 9:20 p.m. Caswell was finished by 9:21 p.m., while Chatham and Durham made their last uploads at 10:41 p.m. and 11:58 p.m., respectively. Meanwhile, Guilford was at it until 12:24 a.m. on Wednesday, and Randolph didn’t have everything done and dusted until 1:32 on Wednesday afternoon.
