During a 2022 Trusted Elections Tour, hosted by the North Carolina Network for Fair, Safe and Secure Elections, a woman from Edenton said she received 14 absentee ballots.
She was concerned about the potential for election fraud, but there was one issue. She didn’t actually receive 14 absentee ballots; she got 14 applications for absentee ballots, and didn’t understand the difference.
“You submit 14 applications, but you're only going to get one ballot because they've got a system in place to make sure that you only vote once,” Bob Orr, former North Carolina Supreme Court justice and co-chair of the N.C. Network for Fair, Safe and Secure Elections, told Carolina Public Press in his retelling.
“It's that sort of kind of simple misunderstanding that generates mistrust in the system, but in most instances, there's a pretty straightforward explanation for it.”
The Edenton woman wasn’t alone in her election skepticism. In 2022, a national Elon University poll found that 37% of respondents had little to no confidence in the fairness of elections, a six-point drop from its 2020 poll.
In North Carolina, a March 2024 WRAL News poll revealed that 29% of likely voters lacked election confidence.
Mistrust is not uniformly distributed among voters. The same poll found that while 44% of 2020 Trump voters lacked confidence in election integrity, only 14% of those who voted for Biden in 2020 felt the same.
How much election fraud is there, really?
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has a team of investigators who look into potential fraud each cycle. They receive tips from county boards of elections, watchdog and advocacy groups, private citizens, political parties and candidates, as well as the team's own internal audits.
Pat Gannon, State Board of Elections spokesperson, said voters seem most unsure about voter list maintenance, electronic voting equipment and voting by non-U.S. citizens.
Between 2015 and 2022, the investigations team looked into 674 cases, which amounts to 0.0024% of total ballots cast during the same timeframe.
Most of those cases occurred in 2017, when more than 400 potential felon voters were detected. Overall, 79% of all referred cases between 2015 and 2022 dealt with voting attempts by felons, who cannot legally vote in North Carolina until they have completed probation and parole. Just eight cases dealt with suspected non-citizen voters or registrants.
Furthermore, no credible evidence exists to suggest that North Carolina has ever been successfully targeted by a cyberattack, according to the State Board’s website.
Concerns about election fraud are “not totally ungrounded,” said Nadine Gibson, assistant professor of public and international affairs at University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
For example, in 2018, a Republican operative in Bladen County conducted a ballot harvesting scheme that was caught, resulting in a second election for a North Carolina U.S. House seat. Those events don’t go unnoticed, Gibson said.
“When voter fraud does happen, it is detected,” she said.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s very secure and safe overall, Orr said. In North Carolina, about 5.5-6 million people will likely vote in the upcoming election.
“I mean, that is a huge number of people in a very complex legal and regulatory system to process, and invariably, there will be mistakes made,” he said.
"(Somebody always) wants to try and game the system. Usually that's more in a very confined, local area. Technology has just provided far more security.”
What about elections do people mistrust?
Everyone’s had glitches with technology in their daily lives, which may make voting technology difficult to trust, Orr said.
Voting machines are not connected to the Internet; any features that would allow any connection to a network are disabled, and machines do not contain modems or modem chips.
All voting equipment must pass extensive testing, public demonstrations and several checks for tampering, ballot stuffing or tabulation errors before use at a polling site. Voting machines’ media ports are covered with tamper-evident seals, and tabulators only recognize approved, encrypted USBs. Multiple physical keys are required to turn the machine on and access any of the media ports.
Katelin Kaiser, policy director of Democracy NC, said voters are also skeptical about ballot counting. They want to know that their ballot is secure, counted and untainted by elections officials.
Every ballot cast, whether manually or electronically, produces a backup paper ballot in case of potential audits and recounts. The county board of elections compares the paper ballot count with the number of registered voters checked in at each polling site, to ensure no votes were added or removed.
Observers from both political parties watch the entire voting process, from the opening to the closing of the poll, to make sure election officials act properly.
Absentee ballots and provisional ballots get an additional review during a post-election canvass, where county elections officials determine whether they are eligible to be counted. These meetings are open to the public.
The pandemic was an outlier in absentee, mail-in ballots. While 18% of total ballots cast in the 2020 election were mail-in, absentee ballots, during the other election years between 2004 and 2022, an average of 3% of total ballots were mail-in absentee ballots.
From 2004 to 2016, a plurality of mail-in votes came from Republican voters. However, between 2016 and 2018, the share of absentee ballots coming from Republicans dropped from 40% to 27%. The downward trajectory has continued since, according to a draft report by the Commission on the Future of North Carolina Elections.
Why do some voters distrust elections?
People are busy. They don’t necessarily have the time to learn the entire election process, Kaiser said.
So, oftentimes, social media fills in the gap. It can either provide helpful information on election security or purposely drive misinformation, Kaiser added.
Gannon listed several reasons why trust may have declined in an emailed statement to Carolina Public Press: the spread of misinformation online, statements by candidates, politicians and high-profile individuals “denigrating the conduct of elections,” foreign operations to spread discord online and a lack of resources for local elections officials to share accurate information.
Michael Bitzer, politics professor at Catawba College, said declining trust started with political elites repeatedly raising unfounded concerns about election integrity to their party’s supporters.
“When those candidates have the kind of following that they do, and are able to put out statements without any facts whatsoever behind them, just conjectures, and it's allowed to spread like wildfire across both the media and social media platforms, it's just a ripe environment for disinformation and misinformation,” Bitzer said.
Gibson was more direct in her blame.
“A lot of it comes from Donald Trump's Twitter account and conspiracy misinformation on the Internet,” she said.
Continuously combatting misinformation from people in positions of authority and trust is difficult, especially when the population overall lacks civic knowledge and media literacy, Gibson added.
“If you won, it's called the winners’ effect, you're going to feel more confident that the election was rightly decided,” she said.
“If you lost, then you're going to be more suspicious of the results. ... If you have someone who's out there saying it was a hoax, that's very persuasive, because people have the tendency to do something called motivated reasoning. You want something to be true. You want the election to be fraudulent, because the actual reality of what happened is contrary to what you want.”
Mac McCorkle, a public policy professor at Duke University, said while Trump’s entrance into the political scene has exacerbated mistrust, ideological polarization at the heart of current American politics has always been right under the surface.
“It's always been there," he said. "But the view from both sides of the other side as not just wrong or misguided, but as devious, manipulative (and doing) anything to win, that creates a lot of distrust,” he said.
He also pointed to technology and gerrymandering as sources of mistrust. When people feel that politicians are putting their thumbs on the scale by redistricting in a way that benefits their party, they may feel like their vote doesn’t matter, McCorkle said. Some get into a “revolutionary mode” instead.
“So it's not completely a push towards apathy, but it's less interest in and less belief that the vote will count, and maybe you have to take power in your own hands somehow beyond the electoral mechanisms,” he said.
Orr said North Carolina is uniquely positioned for the spread of misinformation with its influx of new residents who may not understand why election processes are done a different way than they are used to.
Also, the nationalization of politics has extended to elections, he said.
“You hear the national stories about the whole balloting process, including absentee ballots, and I think people just transpose those over to North Carolina,” Orr said. “If there was a problem in Arizona or Michigan, then there must be a problem here, (people think).”
How can trust be recovered?
When voters lose trust in elections, it “calls into question the whole foundation of our experiment in self-governance,” Bitzer said.
So, how can North Carolina rebuild trust among skeptical voters?
“The answer to all of the problems is educating the public and telling them what's going on,” Gibson said. “The more you learn about how elections work, the less fear you will have in a fraudulent outcome.”
But, misinformation is “sticky.” When people are lied to, and it confirms their pre-existing beliefs, even scientific research can’t always convince them of the truth, she said. Preventative education before potential voters are exposed to misinformation is the best solution.
“There are fake accounts that look like humans and AI-generated things, and there are lots of ways to spread misinformation, but if you understand these things, those things are not going to work,” Gibson said.
The State Board publishes press releases on its website combatting common election misinformation. Gannon said the board is “fighting an uphill battle with very limited resources.”
McCorkle suggested finding more opportunities to get regular people civically involved. For example, he said policy-making bodies or popular referendums and initiatives led by citizens that require the legislature to act may make voters feel like they have more agency.
Bitzer also supported the idea of a public information campaign to spread election knowledge.
“It is very much an environment where people trust their neighbors, I think, to a larger extent than others, and if they see their local processes working and have confidence in them, maybe that starts to build back a foundation of overall trust,” he said.
County boards of election may have differing abilities to educate voters or improve election security, since election funding is “piecemeal,” Kaiser said.
While the General Assembly funds the State Board of Elections, county boards are funded by each county commission however they see fit. The State Board also does not receive funding for voter education beyond the photo ID requirement, Gannon said.
“What we find is that counties sometimes are not adequately funding the local election system, both financially and with personnel,” Orr said. “And so if you're going to have a really good election system, it needs to be adequately funded and supported.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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