North Carolina is voting. Don’t let your social media feed alone decide whether to trust the count.
By: Carson Butts
Early voting opened across North Carolina on Oct. 15, and by Election Day on Nov. 3, voters will have weighed in on everything from a closely watched U.S. Senate race to county commission seats. Alongside the campaigns there’s another contest, though: the fight over whether we will believe the results.
More and more, that fight is playing out on social media. Influencers with large followings deliver 45-second verdicts that the machines are compromised, the voter rolls are padded and the outcome is rigged no matter how we vote. The clips rarely cite a source. They don’t need to. Their currency is reach, not accuracy.
A lot of people my age get their political information this way, and I’ve watched these claims migrate from the fringe into ordinary conversation among peers who are otherwise thoughtful and well informed. The problem isn’t that people ask hard questions about elections. It’s that so few of the people answering them have ever seen how one is run.
This summer, I toured the Durham County Board of Elections with Pillars of the Community, a bipartisan initiative that takes community members behind the scenes of election administration. Director of Elections Derek Bowens and his staff gave us broad access and fielded pointed questions, including some I suspect they don’t hear often, without hesitation or spin.
The fundamentals are reassuring precisely because they are unglamorous. Every vote in North Carolina is cast on a paper ballot, creating a physical record that can be recounted by hand. Tabulators are not connected to the internet. Before each election, every machine undergoes public logic and accuracy testing: staff feed it a deck of test ballots with known results and confirm the totals match. Ballots sit in secured storage with logged access, and chain-of-custody records track who handled what, and when.
The process doesn’t end when the polls close. After every election, randomly selected batches of ballots are counted by hand and compared against the machine totals. Discrepancies are surfaced, documented and resolved. That is what verification looks like in practice.
Almost none of this reaches the average voter’s feed, because process doesn’t generate engagement. Outrage does, and the economics of social media reward whoever can produce the most of it. Some of the people driving these narratives are sincere. Others have monetized the grievance. Very few have spent an afternoon inside a county elections office.
None of this places North Carolina’s elections beyond criticism. The state has seen real misconduct, most notably the 2018 absentee ballot fraud in the 9th Congressional District. But that case is instructive: investigators uncovered it, the State Board of Elections declined to certify the result, a new election was ordered and those involved faced criminal charges. The safeguards worked, because people inside the system did their jobs.
Skepticism is healthy in a democracy, and anyone who cares about elections should practice it. In fact, I believe that you should “trust but verify.” But that means you have to do the actual work to “verify.” That means going to the source, weighing the evidence and being willing to change your mind. Do that work and you find that our elections are run by our neighbors: career county staff, and poll workers from both parties sitting side by side.
Anyone with lingering doubts has better options than the comments section: contact your county board of elections, attend a public test, or serve as a poll worker or observer. I went to Durham with questions, and I still have plenty. The difference is that I now know where to find the answers, and it isn’t my social media feed.