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Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger on Tuesday requested a recount and filed election protests in his primary against Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, according to filings submitted to state and county elections officials.
Page leads Berger by 23 votes—a difference of 0.08 percentage points.
Berger wants the Guilford County, Rockingham County, and state elections boards to conduct a machine recount as well as reassess 233 specific ballots. He wants a partial hand recount of 217 “undervotes,” or ballots where no vote was recorded in the legislative contest, and three “overvotes,” or ballots with votes recorded for both candidates in the state Senate primary.
The State Board of Elections is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday to decide how to direct the elections boards in Guilford and Rockingham counties. Any machine recount would need to be completed during open meetings before the state canvass on March 25. The canvass is the process by which the NCSBE certifies results and confirms that counties properly tabulated all votes.
While the state has some discretionary authority in how to perform recounts, a partial hand recount is typically only supposed to occur in a randomized sample of voting sites after a machine recount is performed.
Berger also submitted formal protests regarding 13 ballots. Eight belonged to unnamed Guilford County voters who he said may have been given a ballot without the Senate District 26 race on it, and three were unaffiliated voters in Rockingham who initially asked for a Democratic ballot but changed their mind in favor of a Republican ballot, which Berger argues is not allowed under state law. Berger further believes one Rockingham County voter incorrectly had her provisional ballot rejected, while another Rockingham County voter who switched from the Democratic Party to unaffiliated was wrongly denied a GOP primary ballot.
“The 233 potentially impacted voters is over 10 times the current vote difference of only 23 votes and could, obviously, impact the election results,” said Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Berger’s campaign. “Close election results like this are why the review and recount process allows for a careful review to ensure all legal votes are counted.”
Page’s campaign called Berger’s protests “paltry” and noted that the 13 votes the Senate leader formally protested wouldn’t sway the outcome of the election.
“We trust that our election officials will not take this bait and will affirm the will of the voters, not the will of one man,” Page spokesman Patrick Sebastian said in a statement.
A Berger loss would be a huge upset. The Senate leader, a 13-term incumbent, ran with the endorsement of President Donald Trump. But MAGA activists have been skeptical of his politics, and he also alienated some Republicans in his district when he backed a proposal to build a casino there in 2023. Page, who gained a national reputation as an immigration hardliner, has been Rockingham’s sheriff for 27 years.
There’s little precedent for recounts overturning a deficit of this size. In the 2024 state Supreme Court general election between Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs and Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, a machine recount resulted in a net gain of six votes for Riggs in Guilford and Rockingham. This year’s primary had much smaller turnout than the 2024 November election.
In a typical process, after the conclusion of an initial machine recount, the trailing candidate has 24 hours to request a hand recount in a sample of 3% of precincts and early voting sites.
Depending on the results from that sample, a full hand recount could be triggered.
After a recount, the Berger-Page race could still be decided in court. Both campaigns appear prepared for a potentially lengthy battle, as they say they’ve created legal expense funds. Berger’s has received $1,000 from the NC Senate Majority Fund Building Fund, records show.
Berger’s campaign has announced it retained Republican election lawyer Phillip Thomas to offer assistance as votes are reviewed. Page’s campaign has hired Alicia Jurney, a family law attorney from Cumberland County.
The legislative primary has already seen unprecedented spending. Berger and a pair of outside groups supporting him spent more than $8.6 million through mid-February and had another $2 million in the bank at the time. Page’s campaign had spent less than $55,000 at that point.