Pender County election official discusses lessons learned from primary election result delay

BURGAW, NC (WWAY) — It’s been several days since the primary elections ended and Pender County continues to work on canvassing its results by March 15th, following a major delay in getting its results out to the public back on Tuesday night.

Several precincts in the county experienced a computer issue where laptops were not communicating with printers, forcing officials to fill out verifying forms by hand.

That slowed down the tallying of votes and officials decided to wait to release the results until all votes were tallied.

For comparison’s sake, while candidates and residents were left waiting until around 1 in the morning for results to be posted, complete results for New Hanover, Brunswick, Columbus, and Bladen Counties were posted before 11:30 pm.

Greg Jackson is the director of elections for Pender County.

He said the county will learn from this so it doesn’t happen again during November’s general election.

“Like every election, we look at all the lessons learned, all the bad things that happened, all the good things that happened,” Jackson said. “We take things away from that in order to be better prepared going into the next election cycle. So it’s a job where its consistently learning from your mistakes and consistently learning from the things you do well. And just focusing on that. And always staying focused on the key elements of being an election official which is to make sure that everybody is able to vote in that election.” 

Jackson said once canvassing of the results is complete, the county will take a more thorough look into what went wrong and work to prevent it from happening again.