If the results of the Pembroke mayor’s race had to pass the smell test, then Allen Dial’s current 11-vote lead would get washed away and another election would be held.

But the North Carolina Board of Elections, which will look at the race, perhaps this week, doesn’t do smell tests, and instead will follow the law when putting the results under a microscope. So who becomes Pembroke’s next mayor, Dial, a former town councilman, or Greg Cummings, another former councilman and Robeson County’s economic development director, remains uncertain.

The Robeson County Board of Elections, not convinced of its own ability to unmuddy the waters, kicked the Pembroke mayor’s race to Raleigh. The local board essentially threw up its arms in frustration after Cummings challenged the residency of two dozen voters on Nov. 30, and 11 votes were tossed out, leaving Dial with an 11-vote lead.

Evidence surfaced during that hearing that some people who claim as their homes commercial buildings owned by Dial had voted, but for whom they voted for can’t be determined. We have a guess.

At the same hearing, it was shown that Dial’s daughter notarized affidavits used by some voters to prove their residency. Again, Dial doesn’t see the problem.

Pretty much everyone else does though.

Still, it’s not certain that election laws have been broken, which says something about current election laws, primarily that they invite fraud.

In recent years, laws have been crafted to make it easier and easier to cast ballots, mostly by widening the window to do so through early voting. Those of us in the summer, fall or winter of our lives for generations found time to cast a ballot when there was but one day to do so — the absentee option was also available — but at some point that became a bar too high for some to clear.

So early voting was introduced, as was the option to register and vote on the same day. In North Carolina, that is no longer an option, and next year the state will require a voter ID unless the courts decide that is unconstitutional.

The point is, the wider the voting window, the more potential for abuse, especially in a county such as ours where get-out-the-vote efforts often determine outcomes. There are, remember, ongoing investigations of all the county’s municipal elections from 2013, including in Pembroke, where a second election was ordered in the race for Town Council that included … drum roll, please … Dial, who went from a winner to a loser in a do-over vote.

Perhaps Dial, as he claims, did nothing wrong and will be confirmed next week as Pembroke’s mayor. Or perhaps Pembroke voters, as they did in 2013, will have to return to the polls to determine a winner.

We don’t know.

But what we do know is that current elections laws just don’t provide assurance, at least in Robeson County, that election outcomes can be trusted.

And that stinks.