A tight race for a high-profile elected position, such as governor, can amplify even small election problems. Such has been the case in North Carolina, which saw Democratic challenger Roy Cooper declare victory following a thin, 5,000-vote lead election night. Incumbent GOP Gov. Pat McCrory refused to concede, noting that tens of thousands of absentee and provisional votes had yet to be counted.

“You have no control over a close race,” said former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, who now practices law in Raleigh. “To that extent, problems are always magnified in a close race, particularly in an important race like governor.”

The race remains undecided as McCrory has weighed the option of a recount unless the final state canvass put Cooper’s lead outside the 10,000-vote margin.

Orr is one of several election analysts spanning the political spectrum who spoke to Carolina Journal about possible changes in the state’s election law that could prevent the many protests and challenges that occurred in the aftermath of this year’s election. The consensus: North Carolina’s existing process works well, but some tweaks could minimize frivolous claims that delay election results without limiting voters’ rights to file legitimate protests.

Orr was on the high court when it was involved in the challenge of the 2004 election for superintendent of public instruction between Democrat June Atkinson and Republican Bill Fletcher. That election was not decided until August 2005 by a vote of the General Assembly.

State election laws allow candidates and voters to file challenges and protests to ballots they think are improperly or illegally cast. The process of investigating complaints can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, causing elections officials to delay the tabulation of final results and the certification of winners for weeks. In the case of the governor’s race, such a delay also could affect the transition process of one administration to another.

Often when races aren’t close, such complaints garner little attention because the number of questionable ballots won’t affect the outcome of an election. But as Orr points out, close elections bring potential irregularities more into focus.

The governor’s race is a prime example. Suggestions for improving — or strengthening — the elections process have included creating a greater evidence threshold for filing complaints and tightening voter registration and voting rules.

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former member of the Federal Elections Commission, noted that post-election standards vary by state. He said best practices should show that the number of votes in question would affect the result of an election, or that election improprieties would cause the public to lose trust in the process.

State Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, who chairs the House Rules Committee, said the General Assembly will use events from the November election to further fine-tune the state’s election laws. Lewis was one of the primary authors of a broad 2013 election reform law.

“Concerns about same-day registration have been validated,” Lewis said, and a lawsuit filed in federal court by the conservative Civitas Institute — which has its initial hearing scheduled for Friday, challenged the process for verifying same-day-registrants’ eligibility to vote.

Lewis said that difficulties in verifying such voters have contributed to the delays in finalizing election totals. In addition, ballots were voters cast ballots that cannot be verified, he said.

McCrory’s campaign has sought a hand recount of more than 90,000 ballotsfrom five early voting tabulators and one election day precinct tabulator — in Durham County, where late election returns blamed on malfunctioning tabulators helped lift Cooper into the lead. The Durham County Board of Elections has denied GOP requests to hand-count the ballots, expressing confidence in their equipment.

The McCrory camp and its supporters filed protests in dozens of other counties, claiming an impropriety in mail-in absentee ballots. The protests spread to 50 counties, with the McCrory campaign saying dead people and felons cast votes. It also said some people had voted more than once.

Regardless, Cooper’s campaign encouraged McCrory to concede. The campaign says the GOP governor’s election claims are “frivolous,” and he’s attempting to “undermine the results of this election.”

The State Board of Elections has dismissed many of the GOP complaints.

“I don’t know how a system can be prepared for such a volume of protests, which have to be evaluated,” said Raleigh attorney Gerry Cohen, who previously was general counsel to the General Assembly and a longtime bill writing director. “The system would have worked better if the people filing these protests had checked them first.”

“Counties are having to spend a huge amount of resources,” Cohen said. “Part of the problem is that the system got slammed by so many protests that weren’t well-researched.”

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina — which promotes open government — echoed Cohen. He suggested setting certain conditions that must be met before a protest can be filed claiming a fraudulent vote.

“I know that we’d never want to handcuff or make it more difficult for a candidate who feels that there are issues to be raised to not have that opportunity to do so,” Phillips said. “But given what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, perhaps there does need to be some scrutiny in making sure that when protests and actual voters’ names are being submitted, that there might be a little bit more of a threshold that you would have to meet before doing this.”

Phillips said he’s concerned about complaints in which voters were identified mistakenly as felons.

“There has been some damage to them,” Phillips said. “You hate to see that.”

Cohen said another inaccuracy occurred when a voter was accused wrongly of voting twice. The voter cast a primary ballot in Maryland earlier this year then moved to North Carolina, legally registered, and voted here, Cohen said.

Equipment and technology are issues, too.

Technical glitches in tabulators used in early voting, and one used on election day resulted in tens of thousands of Durham County’s returns coming late in the night. Durham County is heavily Democratic, which helped to flip the advantage in the governor’s race as votes were tallied statewide from McCrory to Cooper.

“One thing that would help would be for Durham to replace all their voting equipment,” Cohen said.

Durham County, Cohen said, should have granted McCrory’s request to hand count their ballots.

“Asking for a hand count in Durham, I think that’s fair,” Cohen said, adding that counting the ballots by hand could be done so expeditiously and fairly.

Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, said that state law already gives the Durham County board discretionary authority to conduct such recounts.

“The county board of elections or the State Board of Elections may order a recount when necessary to complete the canvass in an election,” state law says.

“They could do it if they wanted,” Gannon said.

Hand-counting ballots, said Orr, would add certainty to the election process.

“There’s a growing lack of confidence, correctly or incorrectly in the electoral system,” Orr saPhillips suggested pushing back the vote canvassing from 10 days after the election to 15 or 18 days after Election Day. That would give local boards more breathing room in verifying people who registered and voted on the same day during the last days of early voting, Phillips said.

Orr suggested tightening the voter registration process.

“To me there needs to be a better review of what’s an appropriate process to register,” Orr said. For example, when people are registering to vote at the DMV workers aren’t asking whether the address is a temporary residence.

“Having a slack approach may not make much difference in a race that isn’t close,” Orr said, but, in a close race, small problems are placed under the proverbial microscope.