Mecklenburg County’s elections director is confident that voting process will be safe and secure
Trust in the electoral system is low for many voters. But Michael Dickerson, director of Mecklenburg County Board of Elections, is more than confident that the elections across the county this fall will be secure and fair.
Dickerson has been Mecklenburg County Elections Director for 28 years. Before that, he worked for the Federal Elections Commission for 14 years.
“I’ve sort of got this election stuff in my blood,” he said. “It's kind of a bug that you're bitten by.”
But Dickerson understands not everyone shares that passion, and in the past few election cycles, he’s seen many voters grow weary or suspicious of the electoral process.
The most common questions his office has received leading up to this midterm election, Dickerson said, relate to mail-in voting. Will voters still receive their absentee ballots — and will they be counted?
The questions were prompted by President Donald Trump’s yearslong claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, and his March executive order that aimed to restrict it ahead of the midterms. As challenges to that order bounced through the courts, concerns from absentee voters intensified. On Sept. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the president’s March executive order — but the flurry of legal battles left many voters still confused.
On Sept. 4, a few days prior to the court’s ruling, North Carolina was the first state in the country to send absentee ballots to voters who had requested one. By Sept. 5, Dickerson said, the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections started to receive completed absentee ballots.
“There was so much talk about, ‘The Supreme Court is going to restrict it, and you're not going to be able to do anything, and we're going to have to not count these ballots,’ or something of that nature. No, we have to go through this process,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson said that, as of Oct. 1, the Board of Elections has already sent around 12,000 absentee ballots. And on Tuesday, the board approved the first round of absentee ballots processed (about 1,200). They’ll continue to do so every Tuesday until Election Day.
Drop boxes for absentee ballots are not permitted under North Carolina law.
Dickerson also described other efforts his team goes through to ensure ballots are secure:
Staff conducts multiple rounds of testing on ballot-marking devices and other voting equipment to ensure everything works properly before early voting starts.
At the end of each day of early voting, staff physically bring Dickerson every ballot cast, and he locks them up in a secure closet that only he and his deputy have access to.
None of the machines used to process ballots or store other election data are connected to the internet, in order to prevent hacking.
There are other concerns, too, that are unique to this midterm.
The Mecklenburg County Elections Board, like all other elections boards across North Carolina, consists of three Republicans and two Democrats. Elections boards shifted into Republican control in 2024 when legislators voted to strip the power to make appointments to the state board of elections from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and give it to Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican. Boliek then appointed new chairs of all county elections boards, establishing Republican majorities. (In Mecklenburg County, his chair appointment was Michael Peretz.)
Also, on the same day North Carolina sent absentee ballots, the Republican-majority North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 3-2 along party lines to enact stricter rules for absentee and provisional ballots that would make it easier to throw them out. Stein called it “a slap in the face to voters who stood up to these changes and a blatant circumvention of the law.”
“North Carolina voters deserve transparency in their elections, not last-minute workarounds that could keep their vote from counting,” he wrote on X.
Dickerson told The Election Hub that he and his staff are “on top of all the memos” and state statutes and act accordingly. But he also said that in Mecklenburg County, the election board works together well, a dynamic he considers himself “fortunate” to have. He pointed to how the two Democrats and three Republicans came to a unanimous decision on how many voting sites would be across the county, initially with Democrats wanting more and Republicans less.
“I have applauded my board for working it out,” he said.
During absentee ballot counting this week, Dickerson said, the board members examined each ballot carefully, spending four hours Tuesday evening to approve ballots. (Provisional ballots will be counted during post-Election Day canvassing.)
Dickerson also addressed other concerns many voters have had since the 2020 election after Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud — such as worries about the security of voting machines, and the belief that a significant number of non-citizens are able to vote.
In addition to voting machines being impossible to hack since they are not connected to the internet, election data is also stored via hyper-secure USB drives. Any computer it is plugged into as results are initially counted are not connected to the internet. And each voting machine is tested for accuracy multiple times before an election.
Dickerson said that on Oct. 1, elections teams across the entire state conducted a “Mocktober” test on all of their voting machines to ensure that their equipment accurately reflects what a voter marks on their ballot.
When the North Carolina State Board of Elections allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to scan its voter rolls for noncitizens, DHS found 35,000 people still on the state’s voter rolls who had died, along with many others who had moved and whose voter statuses were, therefore, inactive. Cases of intentional voter fraud were rare.
“I'm more concerned about the other stuff that can happen,” Dickerson said.
Leading up to the election, he and his office are taking every step they can toward preparedness. He feels confident — and he says many citizens do, too.
“We have thousands of volunteers that want to come out…They’ve got a civic pride and want to make sure that our government keeps working,” he said. “And you're touched by that when people do that. It's really great to see.”
