As the elections results get certified, and a certain political stance forms around questioning the results for almost no reason, officials are doing their best to uphold the integrity of the United States' election process.
This was taken to the appoint that a North Carolina elections director had to challenge and block the absentee ballot of her own mother, who passed before election day.
Sara Knotts of Brunswick County told the internet about the hardest thing she had to do.
Knotts mother, Anne Ashcraft, had voted with an absentee ballot last month. Although she had already dropped her ballot in the mail, she died on October 11th.
Eligibility to vote is based on a person's status on election day. Even though Ashcraft had filled everything out, she was not eligible to vote on election day.
The difficulty of challenging and throwing out your own mother's vote cannot be understated, but it was done to protect our elections.
The Brunswick County Board of Elections took a voted and unanimously agreed to discard the ballot. This was the expected outcome, even before election day.
Knotts told the Fayette Observer:
"Honestly, when she was voting her ballot, she was under hospice care. So I knew that she may not be alive on Election Day."
After her passing, Knotts resolved to challenge the ballot to protect the public perception of the integrity of the election. While the thought did occur to her to convince her mother to not vote at all, she knew voting was important to her.
Instead, she did the difficult thing, and brought the challenge to her mother's ballot up herself.
The power of Knotts' ability to challenge the ballot of her own, deceased mother speaks volumes to what the election officials are willing to do to ensure a fair and accurate count of the election.
Laws that are unfair or unclear in the election process can be worked to be fixed, but a team of people, of human beings, are doing their best to ensure each mandate is followed as they are currently written.
