Orange County’s elections director Rachel Raper will present a report to the Board of Commissioners on Tuesday night breaking down midterm election results in the county.
While the political side of November’s midterms, who won and by how much, has been analyzed many times over by newsrooms and politicos across the country, local demographic information – the who, what, when, where and how – is still being compiled by election officials.
Penny Rich, the newly elected chair of Orange County’s commissioners, told WCHL’s Aaron Keck earlier this month that recent allegations of election fraud in North Carolina’s Robeson and Bladen Counties underline the relevance of taking a second look at our own local election.
Rich said that the new Voter ID laws might only further complicate election matters in the future, depending on the language that ultimately makes up North Carolina’s Voter ID law, which the General Assembly approved before being vetoed by the governor. She said she worries the county governments will be overburdened by the new responsibilities related to voter identification.
“Do we need to go out and contact every person and find out if they have the right ID?” She said. “That’s what the General Assembly is doing; they are throwing it down on the backs of the county commissioners again.”
Affluent counties like Orange have the money for programming surrounding voter information, but poorer counties might be left behind, Rich said. She compared it to education: some North Carolina counties don’t have the money they need to provide adequate education services.
“It’s going to be the same thing with voter I.D.,” she said. “There are folks who are not going to know they need the right ID, and their counties are just not going to have the resources, whether that be money or manpower, womanpower, to go and get those ID’s to them.”
Orange County’s election report is scheduled to be presented to county commissioners at their next meeting Tuesday, December 18.
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