Former NC Gov. Pat McCrory works to overcome public suspicion of election results

Voters should be assured of the safeguards that produce accurate election results and of the professionalism of those responsible for correct counts, said former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

To that end, McCrory, who is the North Carolina leader of a group called RightCount, invited reporters on his tour of the inner workings of the Wake County Board of Elections on Tuesday as staff prepares for the general election.

McCrory said transparency and education will help counter misinformation and build trust in results for both the public and candidates. 

“They’re only hearing what they want to hear to justify their position,” McCrory said. “All politicians who run for office, both Republicans and Democrats, are paranoid about this process. A lot of it is due to them even having a lack of understanding about the professionalism that you saw today and about the process you saw today.”

McCrory is speaking from experience. The former long-time mayor of Charlotte and North Carolina’s latest Republican governor was on the losing end of a close election when Democrat Roy Cooper defeated him by about 10,000 votes in his bid for a second term in 2016. McCrory led the vote count until ballots from Durham were added late on election night. 

At the time, McCrory claimed voter fraud, saying that election errors and illegal voters had changed the outcome of his election. But ten years later, he says suspicion about how the process works hurts democracy. 

“We need to bring back confidence in our democracy. And that comes from someone who was declared the winner one night and then…” McCrory said, before trailing off. 

“We need to overcome that suspicion for our democracy to be sustainable,” he said. “And that’s very important to me because I want to encourage people to vote and have confidence in their vote, and I want to encourage people to run.”

The visit fit in with the Wake election board’s outreach efforts.

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“There’s a lot of information out there and people don’t know how it works,” said Olivia McCall, Wake’s election director. “They don’t understand that there’s checks and balances in place starting well before you ever vote.”

Several thousand precinct officials will be trained to work in Wake County this election season. The training room will become the “war room” on Election Day, with staff sitting by the phones starting at 5:30 am to troubleshoot any last-minute problems at polling sites. 

Bipartisan teams are now putting all voting machines through tests of their coding. 

After each election, every county also double-checks their machines’ accuracy by performing hand counts of two sample groups of ballots chosen by the state Board of Elections.  

James Hardaway, an Apex resident and U.S. Army veteran who is involved in veteran nonprofits, accompanied McCrory on the tour of Wake election headquarters. Hardaway completed his first poll worker training five years ago. 

“When I left my initial training five years ago, I was a little nervous, but as Election Day rolled around I was very prepared,” Hardaway said. “Now I’ve done that training every year since and they do a great job of ensuring that the poll workers, old and new, are all spun up on the new policies and new rules that come into effect.”