In two small North Carolina towns, March 2026 will be more than a midterm primary election. It will be a redo. The State Board of Elections ruled Wednesday that irregularities in the 2025 municipal election require Harrellsville and Morehead City to conduct new mayoral races next year. Harrellsville will also redo its Town Council contest.
Board members unanimously, but reluctantly, authorized the redo elections.
New elections don’t come often or easily. The last time the state elections board called for a new election was in 2022, after a Dobson commissioner race was accidentally tainted by a precinct official. One of the candidates in the contest, Sharon Gates-Hodges, died before Election Day, but after ballots were printed. Her name remained on the ballot.
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A Surry County precinct official attempted to help voters by pointing out her name on a sample ballot, but may have pointed to the wrong, very much alive candidates. That race was decided by eight votes, so it was close enough to redo, the board determined.
Perhaps most prominently, the state elections board redid the Ninth District congressional primary and general election in 2019, after Republican Mark Harris’ campaign consultant McCrae Dowless was caught in a voter fraud scheme.
Dowless collected voters’ absentee ballots and filled them out himself for Republican candidates, including Harris, in Bladen County. Election officials noticed the unusually wide margin between Harris and his Democratic opponent among absentee ballots, and launched an investigation that culminated in a redo election. While Harris, now a U.S. Representative, NC-8, did not run again, Republican Dan Bishop won the seat.
This year’s redo elections may not be quite so dramatic, but they are an acknowledgment of significant issues in the original contests.
“As much pain and suffering and expenses this is going to cost you … every vote matters, so we have to make sure every vote counts,” Republican Board Chair Francis De Luca said.
Harrellsville to redo mayor's race
Lori Nuss didn’t sign up to be mayor. But 10 of Harrellsville’s several dozen residents wrote her in to lead during November’s municipal elections.
There’s just one issue. Seven of the 25 voters may have been ineligible to vote in the contest. In municipal elections, ineligible voters often show up to the polls, not realizing they don’t actually live within town limits.
That was the case in Harrellsville. Poll workers did not properly check voters in or verify their eligibility before allowing them to vote.
Upon discovering the issue, the Hertford County Board of Elections declined to certify the mayor and Town Council elections.
Wednesday, the State Board agreed that there was no better option than to start over and try again. The new election is set for March 3, 2026, the same day as the 2026 primary election.
Hertford County Board of Elections Director Kawania Parker did not immediately respond to questions over what, if any, additional cost the county would incur due to the redo election.
Now, Nuss has a few more months to recruit someone else to take over her late husband’s role as mayor. But if push comes to shove, she’s willing to lead, she told Carolina Public Press.
“I guess I'll let them write my name down again,” she said. “Everybody here is so sweet. I mean, we all work together. We really do. It's not really the mayor, as much as it is the mayor and Town Council that work together.”
Morehead City to vote again
If you’re ever in doubt about the power of one vote, look no further than Morehead City, state elections board member Stacy “Four” Eggers said.
In November, Morehead City Mayor Jerry Jones lost his bid for reelection by one vote; he earned 761 votes to Lee Stile’s 762 votes.
However, after the official results were tallied, Jones filed an election protest. Anyone who is eligible to vote in a contest can file a protest if they can prove that there were election irregularities — unrelated to vote counting and tabulation — that may have impacted the outcome. County election boards take the first look at protests, and they may be referred or appealed to the state if necessary.
In Jones’ protest, he listed a number of voters who said they were turned away at the polls for various reasons. While several of the cases were explainable — voters were eligible for county contests, but not municipal contests, for example — in two cases presented to the state elections board Wednesday, poll workers failed to provide provisional ballots to voters with uncertain eligibility, as the law directs.
Provisional ballots are not automatically counted toward election totals; instead, county boards research them later to determine whether voters are eligible and consequently, whether their ballots should be counted. Poll workers are supposed to offer provisional ballots as a fail-safe to all voters, even those who may appear obviously ineligible.
One voter, Thomas Higgins III, presented a temporary North Carolina driver’s license to vote. That’s not an acceptable form of photo identification, so Higgins should have been provided a Photo ID Exception Form or a provisional ballot, so he could come back later with another form of identification. But Higgins alleged that he was not given that opportunity. Instead, he was turned away without casting a vote.
Another voter, Brady Rodgers, moved from one Morehead City precinct to another on Sept. 26. North Carolina law allows residents who moved over 30 days before Election Day to vote in their new precinct. Rodgers did not report his move to the county elections board, and so he was turned away at the polls. Under state law, he should have been given a provisional ballot, which he could use to update his address while voting.
The Carteret County Board of Elections found evidence of a violation of election law in these cases, and referred the matter to the State Board of Elections.
“These failures are not mere technicalities,” Jones’ attorney Chris Stalk said at the Wednesday meeting. “...In an election decided by a single vote, the improper denial of two eligible votes is not only significant, but it's outcome determinative and plainly sufficient to cast doubt on the apparent results.”
Phil Thomas, who also represented Jones, made an unusual request. He asked the state elections board to allow Higgins and Rodgers to cast a ballot now and add it to the count. As both had testified they intended to vote for Jones in the original election, this move would have almost certainly handed the election to Jones.
Hart Miles, who represented Stiles at the meeting, called it a “dangerous argument.” There was no way to identify which poll workers contributed to the issue, and election workers don’t keep records of who is turned away.
“Given that we have absolutely no idea how many people were wrongly turned away, I submit to this board that awarding this election to Mr. Jones would be tremendously unfair and establish a very dangerous new precedent,” Miles said.
The board unanimously sided with Miles. Eggers and Democratic board member Siobhan Millen emphasized the importance of proper poll worker training that included when to offer provisional ballots to voters.
Carteret County Election Director Caitlin Sabadish said there's a difference between the classroom setting of training and the “high-pressure environment of Election Day.”
“While our officials successfully manage thousands of voters without issue, these rare occasions of human error can occur even when the proper training has been provided,” she said.
Going forward, Sabadish said her team will expand training with more “real-world” training drills.
There's not much of an additional cost, since the redo election was set for the March 3, 2026 primary date, she added.
Other protests
It was a full house at the State Board of Elections meeting. In addition to the Harrellsville and Morehead City issues, the board took on four other election protests.
Murfreesboro Town Council candidate James Byerly raised issues with some students using their Chowan University mailing address as their residential address, even though they technically didn’t live within town limits.
Byerly missed a spot on the Town Council by one vote to James Futrelle Jr. Hertford County Board of Elections dismissed his protest on a technicality — when election protests only deal with voter eligibility issues, they are voter challenges, not election protests. Voter challenges can be considered up to 25 days before an election, but not after.
After some debate, the state elections board sided with the county board. However, they agreed that using mailing addresses as residential addresses is “problematic,” and vowed to figure out better guidance to county boards on the issue in the future.
Two election protests were filed in Kinston; one over the City Council race, and the other over the mayoral race.
In the City Council race, third-place candidate Quarla Blackwell alleged a series of issues with elections. Blackwell has been incarcerated multiple times, she said. When she was most recently released in 2024, the county board of elections told her she was eligible to vote, even though she was under active, supervised probation.
So when she ran for office the next year, she didn’t think anything of it. However, the law had changed by then due to updates in related litigation, and now, she was not eligible to run. Blackwell said she is facing several years in prison due to this issue. And yet, she is still listed as an active voter on North Carolina’s voter roll.
Blackwell said the voter database is “broken” and her experience casts doubt on whether other voters on probation after serving a felony sentence are being allowed to vote.
The State Board rejected her protest on technical grounds. Millen said her protest was not filed on time. Eggers said Blackwell did not prove that enough people were impacted by the issues she spoke of to potentially alter the election outcome.
For her part, Blackwell said she’s taking the issue to court.
In the Kinston mayor’s race, resident Maria President challenged presumptive winner Kareem Moore’s residency. President did not show up at the county elections board hearing, and the state elections board said they did not receive her appeal in time.
Since the burden of proof is on the protester, the board dismissed her protest without getting into the details.
“I'm mindful that it doesn't squarely address the issues, but the issues were not squarely presented to us,” Eggers said.
Finally, in Red Springs, second-place candidate Duron Burney alleged potential voter fraud in an assisted living home. Burney lost the mayoral race by two votes to Caroline Sumpter.
Burney raised concerns over staff at the assisted living home requesting and returning absentee ballots on behalf of residents. There was no way to be sure that the residents actually requested their help, he argued.
While a court order requires disabled voters to be able to request anyone’s help requesting absentee ballots — not just near relatives and legal guardians, as the law requires for everyone else — Burney remains concerned about potential coercion.
Sumpter attorney Eric Fletcher said previously issued State Board guidance detailing the court order makes it simple: a disabled voter who is a patient in a covered facility can receive help from anyone they like.
“That should be the beginning and end of this appeal,” he said.
The state elections board decided they didn’t have enough information. Therefore, they sent the case back to the county to figure out whether residents asked for help and whether the assisted living facility exhausted other options before having staff do the job themselves.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.