#OneTermPat Just Won’t Concede
Roy Cooper has almost 9,700 more votes than Pat McCrory, who still won’t concede. The McCrory campaign is still fighting for a recount in Durham County, despite there being no evidence of anything wrong with the vote count and no path to victory with a margin so wide. It’s time for McCrory to listen to North Carolinians and concede.
While the state board is investigating one issue in Bladen County, many of the protests have been dismissed, and none has produced evidence of a systematic ballot-rigging effort. A handful of ballots have been thrown out in certain extreme cases, such as when a voter cast a ballot early and then died before Election Day. State board members have ordered local boards to forge ahead with reporting results without formally acting on other similarly contested ballots until they can determine whether there are enough votes at issue to make a difference in the election’s outcome. As of right now, there are far fewer challenged votes than what McCrory needs to make up the margin.
The Durham County case is the most important because it involves more than 90,000 early votes that were reported late in the evening on Election Night. Those votes vaulted Cooper into the lead, and Republicans have raised questions about their tabulation and reporting due to problems with Durham County’s voting equipment. The pending appeal from the GOP asks the state to double-check those results.
In a news release Saturday, McCrory said he would drop a request for a statewide recount if the state board were to order a recount of Durham County’s votes and find they were reported correctly. But board members said on the call that they had not seen anything in writing from the campaign with regard to that offer and asked their general counsel, Joshua Lawson, if any such offer had been formally made.
