LUMBERTON, N.C. – Robeson County officials on Monday at least partly blamed a staffing shortage for an Election Night vote tally error.

This county of roughly 130,000 on the South Carolina border was one of 10 counties that continued ballot canvassing on Monday, a task most counties completed by last Friday. For some officials, the task was simple. In Sampson County, they needed to count five additional ballots. Craven County officials had to check a possible double voter.

The task in Robeson County was more complicated. Election officials said their vote tally was missing 1,951 one-stop early vote ballots that were cast at a fire station in Pembroke. Elections Director Tina Bledsoe said on Election Night, staff did not upload the data from the machine's memory card to the N.C. State Board of Elections' database. The ballots were never missing. Bledsoe and Robeson County Board of Elections Chair Larry Townsend said nobody had touched the machine since Election Night.

“In spite of the rumors and accusations, nobody but Jesus Christ knows what's in these machines,” Townsend said before officials pulled the memory card.

Their work still wasn't done. Officials next had to don full-body personal protective equipment while they checked eight ballots that had been cast by voters who declared themselves to be COVID-19 positive. Those ballots had been separated from the rest. Then came the provisional ballots. Officials accepted 719 out of 1,337 total, with another 66 partially accepted. The counting continued well into the evening, stretching the canvass meeting to at least five hours.

What made their work particularly urgent was the state of the race for Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Republican Paul Newby and Democratic incumbent Cheri Beasley have traded the lead multiple times in the past week as additional ballot totals have come in. As of Monday afternoon, Newby led by 231 votes. The deadline to request a recount in statewide races is noon Tuesday and that race is well within the 10,000-vote margin needed to request a recount.

Bledsoe told Spectrum News 1 she had three full-time staff on Election Night instead of the usual six due to departures. The Pembroke early voting site was new this year. When a routine post-election audit found a discrepancy in voting numbers, state analysts were able to deduce which precinct was missing. She said she went back to check the ballot machines and found the memory card still in the Pembroke fire station voting machine.

“I just hate that this happened,” she said. “It's my fault. I'm the one that missed the memory stick. I was trying to do two jobs at least, my old job and this job.”​

Officials in Washington County also had an error to correct. They had double-counted mail-in ballots there due to an issue with that county's voting machines. State election officials said most counties use newer devices that can avoid the situation.