Election canvass to be held today
By Steve Herring
Published in News on November 22, 2016 10:00 AM
The Wayne County Board of Elections this morning was to resume its efforts to canvass the results of the Nov. 8 general election.
No surprises are expected once the canvass is completed and the vote certified, Wayne County Elections Director Dane Beavers said.
The canvass was to have been held Friday, but was delayed to Monday afternoon and then to 10 a.m. this morning because of a federal court ruling that votes of people who signed up at Division of Motor Vehicle offices must be counted unless the agency proves those people refused to register.
The lawsuit alleges that the DMV failed to send registration requests to the state board of elections.
The votes should count unless the DMV shows the voters affirmatively refused in writing to register, the court said.
"We got our (DMV) list, and we ended up counting nine more provisionals (ballots) due to the DMV lists," Beavers said. "We had mostly just some administrative stuff that we went through (Monday).
"We are working on wrapping it up. We should be able to canvass, and right after the 10 o'clock meeting I will change our report to canvassed and that will be it."
The local elections board spent about five and a half hours Thursday reviewing provisional and supplemental absentee ballots.
Provisional ballots include people who did not have an active record of registration, but had indicated that they had registered at the DMV, Beavers said.
Beavers said the vote numbers posted Monday night on the elections board website, waynevotes.com, should not change because of the canvass.
In the gubernatorial race it appears statewide, but not in Wayne County, that Democrat Roy Cooper is continuing to widen his margin over Gov. Pat McCrory, Beavers said.
That lead was almost 7,000 votes by Monday afternoon, he said.
Along with the administrative work handled Monday, the Wayne County Board of Elections held preliminary hearings on two protests filed by Wayne County Republican Party Chairman Brent Heath of Mount Olive.
Heath did not attend the meeting and no evidence was presented supporting the protests.
The board upheld one protest, but dismissed the other.
The board upheld Heath's protest alleging that Corey Lavell Dickerson of Fremont has been "adjudged guilty of a felony" and that as such his ballots cast are "invalid under state law."
"We were able to locate that felon and determined that it was an administrative error," he said. "We retrieved his ballot and removed those votes."
In his second protest, Heath alleged that Albert Artis of Pikeville voted in both Wayne County and in Georgia.
"The people that filed the protest did not show up and did not present any evidence," Beavers said. "We had no grounds to rule on so it was dismissed.
"He was a legitimate registered voter in Wayne County, and he cast an absentee ballot correctly in Wayne County. No one presented any evidence to the contrary."
Beavers said he was not surprised that no one had shown up to present evidence because the protests were "probably generated from somewhere else."
"I don't think the local people putting their name on it are really involved in it too much," he said.