Craven board last in state to finish vote canvass

The 2008 election results from Craven County have been certified as official by the county elections board and the results of the vote canvass have been submitted to the State Board of Elections.

The county became the last in the state to complete its canvass as elections officials struggled with a series of problems in getting 45,181 votes counted correctly.

The problems first surfaced when the polls closed Election Day and early one-stop votes on electronic media cards could not be read by the software.

The change from 41,356 votes counted by Nov. 5 to the final total did not affect the outcome of any race. At least 3,386 of the added votes came with one discovery and a lot of little things added to the count.

The difference in Tuesday's canvass report and the Web site vote count came from canvass report numbers which "were not wrong, just incomplete," said Rosemary Blizzard, state district elections technician. She led a team of state board employees who recounted ballots and reviewed electronic information for nearly a week.

"I'm going to do a further review in Raleigh," Blizzard said. She was scheduled to brief Gary Bartlett, state board of elections director, today on the assortment of vote count problems in Craven County that brought in a state board team to audit and compile the total vote.

Blizzard took issue with a Tuesday comment by Tonya Pitts, Craven elections director, that she did "not believe any state board staff would have ever reconciled" the 337 early votes found on a personal electronic ballot drive that local staff forgot to enter in the tally.

"Her belief was not entirely correct," Blizzard said. "At about the same time she and staff members remembered shutting down the machines that first day at Grantham, I was working with state board of elections IT department. We not only reconciled it, we could identify the voters who were affected."

Blizzard added, "I would like to reassure the voters of Craven County that the resources of the North Carolina Board of Elections are at the disposal of the Craven County Board of Elections to make sure all ballots were accurately counted.

"All of this is going to be used to fine tune our procedures to make sure we don't encounter this issue again."

Pitts said she is scheduled to meet with Bartlett today.

Esther Hardin, chairman of Craven County Board of Elections, said: "As I think back over the election and audit, I just want the voters of Craven County to know that the Board of Elections continued the audit until we exhausted every possibility to make sure very vote was counted. We feel we have successfully done that now and our canvass has been officially submitted."