State Board of Elections certifies November municipal election results

RALEIGH, NC (WWAY) — The State Board of Elections  finalized election results for the November 2021 municipal elections and took steps toward expanding and improving the state’s post-election audits and better explaining them to voters.

The five-member board unanimously certified winners of cross-county contests and authenticated results of county canvasses across North Carolina. Canvass is the official process of determining votes have been counted and tabulated correctly, resulting in the authentication of the official election results.

The State and County Boards of Elections conducted a series of post-election audits as part of the canvass process. Audit results for the November municipal elections are available here. Statewide canvass documents, including final vote tallies for candidates, are available here.

Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, also discussed the risk-limiting audit pilot program conducted by 17 volunteer counties after the November 2021 municipal elections. She recommended continuing the pilot program with volunteer counties in 2022 to test RLAs in the larger-scale midterm elections.

Additional tests of RLAs may allow more volunteer counties to participate and help state and county election officials fine-tune the process before considering a statewide rollout of the audits.

The Board voted 4-1 to continue the pilot program in 2022.

In each pilot county, the RLA substantiated the results of the contest audited.

The State Board also voted unanimously to direct staff to develop a series of legislative and other recommendations on how to improve the state’s existing post-election audit program and better communicate it to voters.

More information on existing post-election procedures and audits is available here.