Faith and Credit

It has been a rough week for the New Hanover County Board of Elections, to say the least.

On Tuesday night, New Hanover County appeared to lag behind nearly every other local elections board in the state — even those in storm-ravaged western N.C. I was live on the air that evening, and for two hours, I fielded increasingly confused and frustrated emails, texts, and phone calls — all while pledging to listeners that results would be posted “soon.” We reached out to Rae Hunter Havens, the county elections director, but didn’t hear back.

When the results were finally posted, they showed extremely tight races all the way down the ballot, with only a few decisive wins (like in State Senate District Seven and the District Attorney’s race). Races for county commissioner and school board seats were close, some within recount range.

Early Wednesday morning, as we began to put together our coverage of election results, we discussed checking in on what had caused the delay. It wasn’t a novel problem and probably had a reasonable explanation; back in February, it took little more than a printer issue to delay primary election results in Pender County for hours. Conspiracy theories flew, and county leaders chaffed, but (relatively) quickly we got the results and a sense of what had happened.

But as we were drafting some questions for Hunter-Havens we started hearing from candidates that there was a bigger issue: hundreds of absentee ballots that hadn’t been included in Election Night totals. Hunter-Havens didn’t respond to calls, but we did get a press release from the county, acting as a spokesperson for the elections office (since she doesn’t have her own communications staff).

We were told Election Night delays had been caused by a long line at the polls, where folks who had shown up before the 7:30 p.m. cutoff had waited two hours before getting to vote. We heard later that it was the UNCW polling location — which makes sense, given college students’ propensity for procrastination (hey, we’ve all been there). 

But Hunter-Havens offered no information about why other precincts hadn’t been reported earlier, or why she or the office hadn’t responded to requests for information on Election Night. It was frustrating, and confusing, but also the kind of thing you could probably overlook.

It was harder to overlook the number of uncounted ballots – 1,900 provisional and 1,500 absentee mail-in.

Now, every year we get provisional ballots that have to be vetted and approved or rejected before the canvass, when votes are finalized. We expected some more this year due to the new voter ID law (which allowed people who forgot a photo ID to bring it to the elections office later, even after Election Day, as long as it was before the canvass). In general, provisional ballots tend to shake out equal parts Democratic and Republican. They can swing very tight races, though, which is why we’re always quick to remind people that Election Night results are unofficial.

Unlike provisional ballots, mail-in absentee ballots tend to lean Democratic, by as much as two-to-one over Republicans. Hundreds of these would definitely shift the race — so 1,500 was definitely a game changer. It was quite likely we could see Democratic candidates get a 500-vote bump over their Republican rivals, which could swing the school board and commissioner race.

In 2020 and 2022, we saw candidates’ margins shift by a few hundred votes after provisional and absentee ballots. But a 2023 law ended the three-day post-Election-Day grace period, which meant we were expecting fewer mail-in ballots. We got the opposite. On social media, we saw people react with confusion and, unfortunately, suspicion. 

While Hunter-Havens again did not respond to phone calls or emails, her statements through the county said the elections board — which is separate from county government— approved an administrative cutoff for mail-in ballots after Oct. 31. That meant all the ballots received between Halloween and 7:30 p.m. on Election Day were outstanding. 

Apparently, Hunter-Havens told county officials that this decision was backed by state guidance. However, county manager Chris Coudriet repeatedly voiced his frustration with this situation in internal emails, suggesting that the elections board had violated the state law requiring all absentee ballots received before the start of Election Day to show up on the initial vote tallies.

Then we heard the elections board had increased its estimate from 1,500 to 1,750 uncounted absentee ballots. 

With prodding from the county, we got responses from Hunter-Havens – although they were somewhat evasive, for example refusing to directly confirm the new number. Emails shared by the county provided a clearer picture. As the government headed into a three-day blackout for Veterans’ Day weekend, a final batch of emails confirmed the initial 1,500 had been a “visual estimate” and that the real number was, in fact, higher.

We turned to the state board, asking for clarity and, frankly, what the hell was going on.

Patrick Gannon, the spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, had already been dismissive of our concerns — saying that additional ballots were always part of the post-election process leading up to the canvass. He’d likewise told the county, which was at this point demanding a meeting with state officials, that their concerns were “ridiculous.” The county’s request was pushed off until early December, according to emails acquired by WHQR.

Gannon and I have had a few tense moments in the past but he’s done a respectable job handling communications for an agency overseeing the complicated, poorly understood, and often fraught processes of both elections and campaign finance. (Once, after sending several increasingly terse emails to the wrong address, I had to eat crow and apologize; Gannon was magnanimous.)

A former StarNews reporter, Gannon knows that journalists just want to get to the truth. But as the spokesperson for a state agency, his job is at least partly to defend the institution — and his prerogative is to dismiss our urgency as impatience. 

His position was that we needed to calm down, and that the results of the canvass would answer any lingering questions. Our position was that we needed answers quickly, or some significant portion of the public would question those results.

Below: An excerpt from Gannon's email.

It’s worth noting that while Gannon defended the status quo, he refuted Hunter Havens’ claims that local decisions had been guided by the state.

“The State Board did not implement or provide statewide guidance for counties not to count absentee ballots that arrived before Election Day on election night,” Gannon told us in an email. “If New Hanover County believed that to be the state’s guidance, it was due to some sort of miscommunication.”

We shared Gannon’s message with the county; Coudriet’s reaction, according to an email acquired by WHQR, was dramatic.

“I have no words. It is the exact opposite of what we’ve been told by local officials,” he wrote with discernable anger to commissioners, signing his email “numb.”

But Gannon wasn’t totally throwing Hunter-Havens under the bus. In fact, in addition to chastising us for our lack of patience, he scolded us for trying to ‘villainize’ her – and pointed to the enormous amount of work done by a small staff, supported largely by volunteers, under the pressure of new, more onerous laws (that’s my paraphrase, not his exact words – but his point is well-taken, Hunter-Havens and her team deserve a lot of credit for their hard work).

But the fact remained there was a real — and growing — gulf between how the public had imagined the election would unfold and how the numbers were actually rolling out. There was also the question of whether Hunter-Havens had followed the law — but, to us at WHQR, an even more important issue was the lack of communication.

Had we known about the administrative decision to push more absentee ballots to the canvass, had we known about the long line of voters at UNCW, had we known about the backlog of mail-in ballots that were not part of the Election Night totals — we could have done so much more to inform the public, to manage expectations, and ‘pre-bunk’ conspiracy theories.

Based on the evidence we had, there was no reason to believe this was a story about illegitimate ballots or voter suppression. The votes would be counted before the canvass on Friday, November 15.

But the optics – of, for example, additional Democratic-leaning votes being ‘found’ – were exactly the kind of thing fantasized at a large scale by Donald Trump and his allies in their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

In our newsroom, we knew we had to thread the needle. We couldn’t ignore this apparent snafu at the New Hanover County Board of Elections – but we didn’t want to sensationalize it. When things go wrong, Occam’s razor tells us to find the simplest explanation; Hanlon’s razor, slightly sharper, tells us to credit incompetence over malice. This didn’t look like a conspiracy. But it did, as Coudriet had written in an email, look bad. Really bad.

Hunter-Havens was hiding from the press. The county, to its credit, was doing the best it could by sharing emails. But communications had broken down. And that leads to frustration, confusion, and suspicion – the words that are the Greek chorus of this story.

At least one candidate has already asked about rumors that UNCW students had been offered $200 to vote, or that a crowd of 50 homeless residents showed up to vote at the Presbyterian church on Shipyard Boulevard, according to emails acquired by WHQR. We’ve seen no evidence of a pay-to-vote scheme – and, it should be noted that the unhoused can legally vote – but the tenor of the questions has likely been tainted by this week’s ongoing issues.

According to a document circulating on social media, which WHQR has verified as authentic, Republican commissioner Dane Scalise has retained legal counsel and is pushing for answers. Scalise was appointed in 2023 and is running for his first full elected term; after a long and expensive campaign, he landed second among three winning candidates – but by a margin that could easily be closed by the outstanding absentee ballots.

Below: Letter sent on behalf of Commissioner Dane Scalise.

On Friday, attorney Phillip Strach wrote the local elections board and the state's elections director and legal counsel, criticizing apparent violations of state law, including the refusal to allow Scalise’s team to inspect ballots. The letter demands an accounting of the chain of custody for the outstanding ballots and efforts to prevent ballot tampering.

I’m not a legal expert, let alone an expert on elections law, but these seem like reasonable requests – given nothing else than the lack of transparency around this year’s election proceedings. 

Less reasonable, in my opinion, was the statement from Woody White, a former county commissioner and current member of the UNC System and New Hanover Community Endowment boards. On Saturday evening, White wrote on X, “The only remedy in this situation is to disqualify these ballots. Chain of custody for every one, is now in question, and what is the appropriate punishment for violation of state election law?”

At WHQR we’ve seen no evidence to date that the chain of custody for these ballots is in question. Making the jump to that conclusion seems premature, at best. But the fact that White would make the claim, at all, is a testament to the damage a lack of transparency and communication can do.

So, I confess, I do agree with the last line of White’s post: “This is embarassing and needs to be addressed.”

This story puts journalists in a tough spot. It is our job to hold government institutions accountable. But, increasingly, we know our work will be used to justify conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns. During Covid, I knew many journalists who were hesitant to criticize public health policy – even when it seemed clearly questionable or flawed – because the net benefit for the public wasn’t there. For them, eroding the trust in the CDC or the local health department wasn’t worth pointing out what they considered to ultimately be minor errors. I’ve seen the same with journalists and media outlets as they wrangle with this balancing act in reporting on law enforcement, education, and – of course – the elections system.

It’s a personal issue for me. I spent years of my professional life working to expose abuse and neglect of children at the New Hanover County Schools district. And I’ve seen my own work used – at times thrown in my face – to prop up baseless allegations that teachers writ large are “groomers” and other noxious conspiracies.

This behavior can push journalists into the awkward position of defending – on faith – the institutions of which they’re trained to be skeptical. And while I think that position is tenable, and my colleagues and I at WHQR work hard to balance that with our duties as watchdogs, it's a difficult situation.

We know government isn’t an abstraction, but a collection of very real people, many of whom are working hard to do good for their community – and we try to give them all the credit they are due. But if we are to have faith, and give credit, then it’s only fair that we demand transparency and expect accountability. 

In Case You Missed It

Here are some more stories from the week:

PBS documentary bringing the history of Wilmington's coup and massacre to a broader audience: Over the last decade, the 1898 coup and massacre have become more openly discussed and memorialized in the Wilmington area — but outside of the Cape Fear region the history is less well known. One hundred and twenty-six years after the coup, on November 12, American Experience and PBS North Carolina will be telling the story to a much wider audience. The episode, premiering as part of the network’s long-running documentary series, explores the events leading up to, during, and after the 1898 Wilmington Massacre.

Fracaswell Hyman on acting, writing for kids, and taking chances: WHQR’s arts reporter Demia Avery recently spoke with actor and writer Fracaswell Hyman. He’s a North Carolina native who worked on the PBS children’s show Ghostwriter and more recently moved into children’s fiction.

Around Town With Rhonda Bellamy: Cape Fear Book Festival: Rhonda's guest this week is a librarian and event coordinator for the first-ever Cape Fear Book Festival, Christine Ingram. The Cape Fear Book Festival (organized by the New Hanover County Public Library and Friends of the Library) will be held November 22-23 in downtown Wilmington.

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