Fayetteville sandwich shop owner and real estate professional Peter Pappas was granted a recount on Monday in the election for District 2 of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.
Pappas placed fourth, 177 votes behind Henry Tyson, among the six candidates in the three-seat District 2 election. That is a 0.23% difference among the total of 75,589 votes cast for Tyson and for Pappas. State law grants a recount upon request of the trailing candidate when the margin is 1% or less.
Pappas said he had spoken about his recount plans to the three leaders in the race, Tyson, Kirk deViere and Pavan Patel. “And I said: It’s not spite or malice. I just feel like we owe it — we all would owe it — to our voters to ask for it,” Pappas told CityView on Monday after the county Board of Elections completed its canvass and certified the results of the 2024 election.
He acknowledged it’s unlikely that the results will change.
“My expectation is not to flip this election. My expectation is just for accountability,” he said.
Tyson said he has no problem with the recount request.
“I support transparent elections, and so if he feels like that was the way he wanted to go, I certainly respect that,” Tyson said. “I think at the end of the day, we just want to make sure that the will of the voters is what’s instituted, for sure.”
The recount will start at 9 a.m. Wednesday and is likely to run until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. that evening, Elections Director Angie Amaro said at the Board of Elections meeting on Monday afternoon.
The election results, pending the Pappas recount, in the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners District 2 election:
- DeViere, Democrat, winner, 41,686 votes
- Patel, Republican, winner, 38,751 votes
- Tyson, Republican, winner, 37,883 votes
- Pappas, Republican, 37,706 votes
- Karla Icaza, Democrat, 37,330 votes
- Toni Stewart, Democratic incumbent, 36,656 votes
District 2 covers most of Cumberland County, in a U-shape that has all of the east side, all of the the south side, and the west side south of Fort Liberty.
Even if Pappas had not requested a recount, the county elections workers were prepared to spend the day counting 140,941 ballots because the election for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court is extremely close.
As of 7:20 p.m. Monday evening, Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs led Republican challenger Jefferson G. Griffin by just 66 votes out of more than 5.5 million.
Statewide, all 5.72 million ballots that were accepted and counted will be recounted if Riggs or Griffin (depending on who ultimately trails after the canvasses are complete) requests a recount.
As of 7:35 p.m. Monday, five counties were still working on the canvasses and final vote totals, according to the State Board of Elections website.
[Update: As of Tuesday morning, Riggs’s lead grew to 625 votes after three of the five remaining counties completed their canvasses.]
According to the State Board of Elections, local boards on Monday were wrapping up decisions on whether to accept or reject provisionally cast ballots, ballots from voters who voted early or by absentee and then died before Election Day and ballots from people who registered to vote when voting early whose addresses could not be verified.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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Thanks Paul for a well balanced article on the state of recounts, etc