NOTE: This article has been updated to add today’s action at the Cumberland County Board of Elections, and additional information on why the list of Republican observers was submitted after the deadline on Monday.
Election Day got underway today in Cumberland County with a key group of people missing from its 77 voting precincts: Republican election observers.
Cumberland County Republican Party Chair Nina Morton said she tried to send her list of poll observers by email to county Board of Elections Director Angie Amaro about five minutes before the deadline, which was noon Monday. But something went wrong with her laptop or internet connection, Morton said, and the list didn’t get sent until 12:02 p.m.
State law says that is too late.
“To me, it was devastating. I felt horrible,” Morton told CityView this morning.
Twenty-four hours later, shortly after noon today, the county Board of Elections voted 3-2 against allowing the GOP’s observers to go into the polls for the remainder of the day. The three Democratic members voted against allowing them, while the two Republicans voted in favor.
What are poll observers?
The political parties are allowed to assign two poll observers per precinct, plus an additional 10 as “at large” observers who may visit any precinct, said county Elections Board Chair and Democrat Irene Grimes. That is 164 total observers per party in Cumberland County.
Republican Elections Board Member Linda Devore said she has trained observers in past elections and attended a training session this year. “They are there to observe and report any irregularities in the check-in and voting process to the chief judge on site, and to the party desk if it is not resolved or more serious,” Devore said.
The Cumberland County Democratic Party submitted a list of 19 observers — nine assigned to precincts and 10 at large — Grimes said.
Morton said she submitted a list of 77 people who would have been poll observers. They would have been assigned to 69 of the county’s precincts.
GOP leader has faith in election workers
Once she realized she had missed the submission deadline by two minutes, Morton said, she consulted with the state Republican Party and one of its lawyers, and was told there was nothing they could do.
“It’s done. All we can do now is recover, like I said, and move forward,” she said.
“We do have eyes inside. We have our voters inside. And we have our workers and our assistants in there,” she said. “And I trust that they’ll do the right thing. I really do.”
A majority of the Cumberland County Republican Party’s executive committee has confidence in the balloting, she said. They had observers in place during early voting, which ran from Oct. 17 to Nov. 2.
“We’ve watched the process,” Morton said. “We watched during early voting. It looked like things were being run smoothly.”
If the Republican observers during early voting had seen questionable activities, such as failure to ask a voter to present photo identification, she would be far less confident.
“If we’d seen things like that going on, we certainly wouldn’t be feeling this way today. We’d be very nervous,” Morton said. “But they were asking for ID, they were doing everything they were supposed to do, from what we saw.”
In addition to the local election observers, Grimes said, North Carolina’s election observer law allows the political parties to have as many as 100 observers who can go anywhere in the state to monitor the polling.
The North Carolina Republican Party is sending support to Cumberland County, NCGOP spokesman Matt Mercer told CityView.
“Roving attorneys and additional statewide observers have been deployed to Cumberland County,” Mercer said. “That’s the benefit of our robust election integrity efforts throughout the election cycle.”
Failed effort to reinstate the observers
Devore — one of the Republican members of the county Board of Elections — tried at the board’s meeting at noon Tuesday to persuade the board to make an exception and allow the Republican observers despite the missed deadline.
Morton tried to submit the GOP list on time but was stymied by technical problems, Devore argued.
“She was struggling, she called for help, and we didn’t provide it,” Devore said. “And I’m just saying I think it’s a particularly bad look to not give her the benefit of the doubt, to allow these observers in even at this late hour.”
Grimes argued against making an exception to the law.
“I think it is bad not to have observers of both parties in this county. I agree there,” Grimes said. “But neither the staff nor anybody else can be made responsible for somebody not doing their duty and getting the list here on time.”
Vicki P. Hilburn, the deputy director of the county Board of Elections office, said the county staff consulted the State Board of Elections elections office and was told it was too late to accept the list of observers.
The county elections board rejected Devore’s effort in a 3-2 vote.
Democratic members Grimes, Derek Edmonds and Billy R. King voted to follow the law and not make an exception. Republicans Devore and James Baker against.
Timeline of what went wrong
Here is the sequence of events that led to the lack of Republican observers at Cumberland County’s polls on Election Day, based on interviews with Morton, Devore, Grimes, comments at Tuesday’s Board of Elections meeting, and an email and information provided by the county staff.
Approximately 11:55 a.m. Monday: Morton said she attempted to email the Cumberland County Republican Party’s list of Election Day precinct observers to Angie Amaro, the elections director. After Morton clicked the “send” button on her email software, she said she stepped away from the computer to answer the door at the GOP headquarters.
Approximately 11:58 a.m.: Morton returned to the computer and saw that it was still attempting to send the email to the Board of Elections. She said she clicked the “send” button again.
Morton told CityView the computer at other times has had difficulty sending emails, including Monday afternoon when it took seven minutes for her to forward the message with the list of observers to an attorney for the state Republican Party.
Noon: Deadline, set by North Carolina law, for county elections offices to receive precinct observer lists from their local political parties.
12:02 p.m.: Time stamp on Morton’s computer as to when it finally transmitted her email to Elections Director Amaro.
12:03 p.m.: Time stamp in the Cumberland County email system noting when it received Morton’s email. The county’s system automatically blocked Morton’s email from reaching Amaro because the message had an RTF document attached to it, and that was seen as a computer security risk. Morton was unaware until Tuesday that the system had blocked her email to Amaro. Amaro was also unaware this happened.
RTF stands for Rich Text Format. RTF is a commonly used format for documents created with word processors and text editors. However, RTF files can be used by malicious computer hackers to break into computer systems. Morton told CityView she uses RTF format files routinely, and her list of observers for Election Day was in an RTF document.
According to Cumberland County’s information technology staff, the security in the county’s email system had nothing to do with any difficulty Morton had in transmitting the email in the first place.
“Our email system would not have created delays on the part of the sending computer. It would most likely be attributed to the local computer, connection, internet, etc.,” Chief ITS Director Keith Todd said in a statement.
Shortly after noon: Morton called the staff at the county Elections Office about the observer list, to attempt to get it accepted.
Approximately 6 p.m. Monday: Amaro informed the county Elections Board she had not received a list of Republican Party observers.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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