Counties have begun recounting votes in close races and have until the end of the day Wednesday to report their results.

June S. Atkinson, the Demo-cratic candidate for public instruction, led Fletcher by more than 9,000 votes before the recount. The Republican candidate for agriculture commissioner, Steve Troxler, led Democrat Britt Cobb by more than 2,600 votes.

When Judge Henry W. Hight Jr. rules on the recount, state Elections Director Gary Bartlett probably will be in Carteret County investigating how a voting machine ignored more than 4,000 votes.

New election possible

"We've had machine problems," Bartlett said. "We've never had one of this magnitude. We've never had an election where a machine malfunction caused a new election."

Another statewide election -- at a cost of $3 million to $3.5 million -- is still possible as elections officials try to answer the multiplying questions about ballots counted and not counted.

The close statewide races have spotlighted the voting problems, as the disputed presidential election did in Florida in 2000.

State Sen. Ellie Kinnaird of Carrboro and state Rep. Verla Insko of Chapel Hill want a law they say could prevent another machine problem like Carteret's. They propose that a legislative study commission look at requiring voting machines to produce a paper record, something like a receipt, for voters after they cast their ballots.

"It's the confidence that voters have that their vote is being counted that's important," Insko said. "I think trust is at an all-time low right now."

But the commission has not met because legislators are still trying to decide who should be on it.

With the new move against some provisional ballots, North Carolina is addressing a question that other states already have resolved.

Federal courts upheld challenges to provisional ballots cast in the wrong place in Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Michigan and Colorado, said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan Web site that collects and analyzes information on election changes.

Out-of-precinct trouble

Here, the issue is a little different. North Carolina allows provisional ballots that are cast in the wrong place to be counted if otherwise valid. But the politicians challenging provisional ballots say that the practice violates the state constitution.

Under the constitution, counties should not count votes for state and local candidates cast by people who have not lived in their precincts 30 days, said Michael Crowell, an attorney for Fletcher and the local candidates.

Besides, said Fletcher, the counties don't have a uniform procedure for tallying those votes.

Atkinson, who attended the court hearing Monday on Fletcher's request to stop the recount, said it should not matter which precinct voters live in when counting votes in a statewide election.

Atkinson speculated that Fletcher decided to try to limit the vote count when he saw her winning margins in urban areas.

Fletcher said he didn't know who would benefit from a court order to disregard the ballots. "We don't have that level of detail to know how this action will alter the election and whether it will or won't," he said. "What we want is an accurate count."

John Wallace, a lawyer for Atkinson, said the state allows people to vote outside their precincts with early, one-stop voting and with absentee voting.

The argument that an out-of-precinct vote is illegal "is simply wrong," he said.