CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Voters who are concerned or just curious about the accuracy of North Carolina’s voting machines can watch Wednesday as state elections officials randomly choose precincts, early voting sites and absentee-by-mail ballots to be counted by hand.
State law requires county and state Boards of Elections to conduct audits after each election to ensure voting machines are correctly tabulating the results. It’s just one of multiple post-election audits aimed at ensuring accurate elections, the state website noted.
This year’s audit of the 2022 general election will start at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the board room of the State Board of Elections office on North Salisbury Street in Raleigh. Voters can watch live online via Microsoft Teams or watch the video later on the State Board of Elections website.
Post-election audits are separate from the official vote canvass, which certifies the winners in each county and will take place on Nov. 18. The State Board of Elections will conduct its final canvass on Nov. 29.
State officials noted in the release that the audit actually starts before the election in each county, where the local elections board tests every tabulator that will be used to make sure it is properly coded to accurately count ballots.
State officials start the post-election count by rolling 10 different 10-sided dice to get a 10-digit “seed number.” The number is put into a software program, along with an input file for each county of Election Day precincts, one-stop early voting sites and mail-in ballots.
The software program randomly generates two groups of ballots for each county. State elections officials give a list of the ballot groups to the local Board of Elections and post them on the elections website.
State officials also assign each county board a specific contest to audit, although in presidential election years, all county boards audit the presidential race, the state elections website noted.
Bipartisan teams of volunteers from each county Board of Elections hand count the results in their assigned ballot groups and compared them with the results reported by local voting machines. The volunteers are trained in how to conduct the hand-to-eye counts.
The entire process of choosing the ballot groups is transparent and can be reproduced by individual voters, elections officials said. The data and a free copy of the software, as well as instructions for how to install the program, are available online.
The state’s input data also is available online, they said. Voters also can view the results of past election audits on the state website.
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