I’ve gotten a few questions about this. First, there was a request for a machine recount of the by-a-tiny-nose North Carolina Supreme Court election between incumbent Allison Riggs and challenger Jefferson Griffin. Then there was a request for a recount of samples of ballots, comparing the machine counts for those samples to hand counts. Then there was a challenge to the validity of more than 60,000 ballots that had been cast.
Leaving aside the merits of any of the claims in the final challenge (there are real questions about the accuracy of the claims in that challenge), the different procedures are all contemplated by state law, as different ways to ensure that the results were right. The first two recounts are designed to make sure that the ballots were tallied accurately (and so far, it looks like they really, really were, with 110 votes statewide changing on each side, out of 2.8 million votes apiece). The challenge procedure is designed to make sure that the ballots that were tallied should have been tallied.
In a race this tight, these types of procedures are to be expected. And so far, what they’re showing is how well the elections process works.