By Blake Proctor
Canvass: “Aggregating or confirming every valid ballot cast and counted – absentee, early voting, Election Day, provisional, challenged, and uniformed and overseas citizen.” It also means to “question,” “investigate,” “challenge,” “dispute,” and “examine.”
The flip side of this is, of course, ensuring that invalid ballots are challenged and perhaps not counted; and, this is what the Bladen County Board of Elections did Friday, November 13th, beginning at 11am.
Upon examination by all five Board members, it had been determined that of the 14,000+ ballots cast in this General Election, only three contested ballots are left to challenge: Two are a married couple who had admitted that they had erroneously voted at a one-stop polling place and then voted again absentee. The Board voted unanimously to redact the absentee votes from the total cast.
The third challenged vote was cast by a felon who has been “released on parole,” but had not, however, had his voting rights restored. In order to have those rights restored, a felon must be on “post-release” or “extended parole,” which was not the case in this instance. The Board again voted unanimously to redact this vote.
This reporter asked Chair Louella Thompson if any of the 58 absentee ballots accepted of the 61 recently reviewed, or any of the 48 provisional ballots accepted of the 127 recently reviewed, were part of those that had been hand-carried that day from the Post Office. The response from Board Executive Director Chris Williams was an emphatic “no!”
After the Board voted on all three challenges, Director Chris Williams, joined by a Board member from each Party as observers – Michael Aycock as the Republican and Patsy Sheppard as the Democrat – departed to the ballot tabulating machine to redact these three ballots from the total count. This procedure took about twenty-two minutes.
Following this process, there was a motion by Mr. Aycock with a second by Emery White, to accept the abstract of votes. This motion was unanimously approved and the Bladen County votes are now official.
A member of the audience questioned why there was no invocation or Pledge to the Flag during this meeting. Chair Thompson replied that those are only for regular meetings, but the attendee claimed that Gov. Roy Cooper had said an invocation and the Pledge were expected at all meetings; there was no further discussion.
There being no further business in this election cycle, the meeting adjourned at 12:01pm.
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