The Buncombe County Board of Elections completed a partial hand-to-eye recount of three randomly selected precincts and early voting sites on Thursday, Dec. 5 at 11:32 a.m. The recount showed zero discrepancies from the machine recount and this data will be submitted to the State Board of Elections.
Republican candidate Jefferson G. Griffin requested the partial hand-to-eye recount, which he is entitled to request under state law. A similar recount is taking place in all 100 North Carolina counties after a statewide machine recount of all ballots cast in the contest for NC Supreme Court Associate Justice Seat 6.
The initial recount was conducted by machine, with Buncombe Board of Elections teams feeding all ballots cast in the election through tabulators and finishing that recount on Nov. 25. That recount took six days with 38 election officials, 14 seasonal staff, and 12 permanent staff. The sample hand-to-eye recount is designed to determine whether there are sufficient discrepancies from the machine recount to require a full hand-to-eye recount of all ballots cast in the contest.
On Tuesday morning, the State Board randomly generated the list of precincts and early voting sites for Buncombe County. See Random Selection Results: Supreme Court Associate Justice Seat 6 Sample Hand Recount. The randomly selected sites were West Asheville Library for Early Voting, Precinct 36.1, and Precinct 70.1. The recount took one and a half days and took a total of 32 people in bipartisan teams.
For details on the conduct of hand-to-eye recounts, see Numbered Memo 2024-09: Hand-To-Eye Recount.
Recount results for the Supreme Court contest are available on the State Board’s Election Results Dashboard.
What’s Next?
The sample recount is used to determine whether a full hand-to-eye recount of all ballots cast statewide is required. If the results of the hand-to-eye recount among the randomly selected voting sites differ from the machine recount, such that extrapolating the amount of the change to the entire state (based on the proportion of ballots recounted to the total votes cast for that office) would result in reversing the results, the State Board will order a statewide hand-to-eye recount of all ballots in that contest.
The next meeting of the Buncombe County Board of Elections will take place Dec. 18 at 2 p.m., at 59 Woodfin Place.