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RALEIGH (AP) — The State Board of Elections signed off today on North Carolina's election results, approving the numbers in an unusually uneventful canvass that brought no objections.

Elections board director Gary Bartlett said in an interview that officials usually expect to handle up to 10 election concerns around Canvass Day. But there were no protests raised this year, and one pending issue from Cumberland County has already been investigated by state election organizers.

"Zero issues - it doesn't get any better than that," Bartlett said.

Bartlett attributed the success, in part, to the training provided to workers and partly to luck. For example, he noted that two people running for the school district board in Nash and Edgecombe county were inadvertently left off the ballot — but they had no opposition in the race.

"As much as you train, and as much as you can be right, something can always happen," Bartlett said. "It just didn't this time, and we're thankful."

This year's election had three heated races at the top of the ballot, including president-elect Barack Obama's win by a mere 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million cast. With hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters, elections observers initially raised concerns about the volume.

Another concern about a quirky state law that doesn't include the presidential race as part of a "straight ticket" vote had election workers scrambling to inform voters. A straight ticket vote allows voters to cast their ballot for all the candidates from a particular party. But numbers indicated it wasn't a problem on Election Day.

"It was very good year — particularly given the high interest and the high volume," said Bob Hall, director of the nonpartisan election watchdog Democracy North Carolina. "There was concern early on that there could be some real problems with this many people trying to vote."

Hall did have some things he wanted to improve. He'd like to address the straight-ticket option to ensure that it isn't confusing for voters. And he's interested in expanding the early voting schedule to include another weekend day. In its first presidential election year, early voting brought more than 2.4 million voters to one-stop sites — dwarfing the number of people that showed up on Election Day.

Bartlett said elections workers will work in the coming months to conduct a systemwide assessment to identify ways to continue improving and streamlining operations.