8 reasons you can trust elections in North Carolina

In North Carolina, there is clear, credible, and objective evidence proving that we can trust our elections, despite what some dishonest politicians are saying.

A new Elon University poll should give us all something to think about. Only about 48% of those polled said they have confidence in the national vote count.

Cardinal & Pine’s 2024 Voting Guide for North Carolina. Bookmark This Page. 

Since the 2020 election, former President Trump and his allies in the Republican Party have insisted that American elections are rigged against them.

Most of their claims are unfounded or silly, but what those claims have done to Americans and their belief in elections isn’t. This Elon poll is more proof. Their claims have damaged a core tenet of American democracy.

• One analysis after another—even ones conducted by conservatives and Trump’s former attorney general—finds no evidence of widespread voter fraud or election fraud in the United States.
• Another area of concern for many folks is vote-by-mail, but cheating is vanishingly rare there too. CNN reports that the rate of voter fraud in vote-by-mail, based upon analysis of billions of absentee ballots in multiple elections, is about .00001%, which is about how likely you are to be struck by lightning.
• There is no evidence that dead people or undocumented people are voting, despite repeated claims to the contrary from former President Trump and some of his MAGA allies. As we speak, North Carolina Republicans are trying to boot about 225,000 people off the voting rolls, using similar misinformation. It probably won’t work because it would violate federal laws intended to protect voter purges this close to an election.
• In North Carolina, there are safety checks on top of safety checks to prevent someone from hacking the election. For instance, the entire state of NC uses paper ballots which are really easy to audit. There’s a paper trail, y’all.
• None of NC’s voting machines are connected to the internet, so no, there’s no genius hacker gaining access from the web, or manipulating the outcome.
• Every polling place has trained election workers from your local community. These aren’t nefarious spies. They’re people you see at the grocery store or at school drop-off who care enough about democracy to be vetted and go through training and oversight to make sure voters get their say. By the way, here’s how to be one of those people.
• Before any election is certified, State and County Boards of Elections do multiple checks for irregularities. They look for tampering with equipment, ballot stuffing, or any errors in tabulation.
• They also choose two voting sites at random in EACH of our 100 counties, and hand-count the ballots to make sure they line up with the machine count.

No matter who you’re trusting to be president, one thing we can all agree on is that there is clear, credible, and objective evidence proving that we can trust our elections.

Memes you see on Facebook don’t count as credible information—but here’s something that does: this FAQ page from the NC State Board of Elections on their numerous election security protocols.

Because the alternative is a democracy where people don’t believe in elections, and that’s like a bicycle without wheels.