City greets Trusted Elections Tour

Voting might seem easy — but actually can be a complicated process, based on discussion during a North Carolina Trusted Elections Tour meeting in Mount Airy.

The tour involves a series of 27 town hall sessions being held across the state, with Mount Airy getting its turn Wednesday night.

About 30 people gathered in council chambers at the Municipal Building to hear a five-member panel of local elections officials and others present information on the electoral process. The audience included city and county commissioners and candidates for those offices.

The North Carolina Trusted Elections Tour is promoted as a bi-partisan effort to present the voting system as safe and reliable.

Yet at times Wednesday, some partisan tones did creep into the discussion.

Bob Orr, the moderator for the program, commented at the start of the meeting that one purpose of the tour is to counter “fake things out there” — an apparent reference to such claims as those revolving around supposedly stolen elections.

Orr is a longtime Republican-turned-unaffiliated-voter who formerly served on the N.C. Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court and still practices law.

Then later in the meeting, Jimmy Yokeley, a Republican member of the Surry County Board of Elections who joined Democratic member and board Chairman Dwayne Carter as panelists, questioned a state practice surrounding citizenship vetting.

Yokeley said prospective voters are allowed to attest to being U.S. citizens rather than providing proper credentials for that. The GOP is suing the N.C. State Board of Elections over this issue.

“The laws should be stricter when it comes to verification of citizenship,” Yokeley said Wednesday night.

Many topics covered

All in all, the city stopover of the North Carolina Trusted Elections Tour was a civil and informative event.

The entire voting process was dissected, especially at the local level, with a number of subjects addressed.

Among these were absentee voting, a timely focus with lingering concerns over abuses of mail-in ballots; provisional voting; maintaining voter rolls; security; and procedures for Election Day, coming next on Nov. 5.

County Director of Elections Michella Huff, another of the five panelists, said a batch of 577 absentee ballots by mail will be sent out today.

As these are returned, the bi-partisan Board of Elections will meet periodically to review the ballots to make sure everything lines up, such as proper signatures and the photo ID requirement being met.

“Then we make a judgment,” Chairman Carter said on whether the ballots will be counted or returned to voters for clarifications or corrections. “We make the call.”

“I think we have a solid checks-and-balances system,” said Yokeley, Carter’s Republican counterpart.

The chairman also addressed situations including someone requesting a mail ballot and then trying to vote in person, citing a case in which a citizen did this thinking two different elections were involved.

“The in-person vote is counted,” Carter said, and no others that might be cast.

Provisional ballots may be relied on, such as for people lacking proper credentials when visiting the polls.

In those cases, they are allowed to vote on a provisional basis, to later be verified before it is allowed to count.

Voter challenges

Another part of Wednesday night’s discussion surrounded the fact that ensuring voting integrity is not just the task of election officials, but also the public.

“Any citizen in the county can file a voter challenge,” Yokeley mentioned, in cases such as knowing voters are using addresses where they don’t actually live.

“Don’t just keep complaining about it,” is his message to folks aware of such circumstances.

Huff mentioned that rolls of voters regularly are checked for the presence of multiple addresses, which raises a red flag. “We perform list maintenance weekly now.”

“The focus is, what does the law say and how do we apply it?” Yokeley observed.

Anne Tindall, also a panelist, who is special counsel with an entity called Protect Democracy working to ensure elections are free, fair and peaceful, agreed along those lines that local elections personnel sometimes are blamed unfairly for allowable practices.

“It’s not these people’s job to change the law,” Tindall remarked, just to abide by those regulations.

Dr. Stephen Tate, the fifth panelist, who is a cybersecurity expert and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, also commented on that.

“These are very dedicated people,” Tate said of elections personnel. They have different political leanings, but strive for integrity, he added.

“They all want only legal votes to count.”

Election Day game plan

Huff, the local elections director, also talked about what happens on the final day of voting.

In addition to Surry elections board oversight and full-time staff functions, 180 temporary poll workers are assigned to the county’s precincts on Elections Day.

A candidate also is allowed two observers per location who do just that, Huff stressed. “The main thing is they cannot interfere with the electoral process,” including initiating conversations with or taking photographs of voters.

Yokeley told the audience that barriers also are placed at Surry precincts to keep someone from driving into a polling location.

And at the end of the day, the transporting of full ballot boxes from precincts to the board headquarters in Dobson is carefully monitored, including prescribed times and travel distances.

AirTags also are placed in each box to track the deliverers’ movements along the way.

“Everything is truly transparent,” Huff said, noting that Board of Elections meetings are open to the public.