Close NC races likely to remain so for another week
Anyone looking for finality to the 2020 elections will have to wait a bit longer in North Carolina.
"The actual casting of ballots has ended, but the election is not over," state elections director Karen Brinson Bell said Wednesday.
North Carolina smashed its previous records for total votes cast and voter turnout, with 74 percent of registered voters casting 5.5 million ballots, said Damon Circosta, chairman of the State Board of Elections.
County elections officials will spend the coming days determining which provisional ballots cast Tuesday and which late-arriving absentee ballots will count, and those votes won't be added into the mix until next week because of legal requirements tied to local elections board meetings, officials said.
"With very few exceptions would North Carolina's numbers move before the 12th or 13th," Brinson Bell said, referring to the Nov. 12 deadline for absentee ballots to arrive by mail and the Nov. 13 canvass held by county boards to certify their results.
"Our job is to get the count right as fast as we can but above all correct," Circosta said.
About 117,000 absentee ballots requested by voters remain outstanding, although some of those voters might have gone to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots. Brinson Bell said it will take a while to cross-check Election Day voting records against the absentee requests to determine how many ballots could still be in the mail.
The NC Watchdog Reporting Network analyzed state election data and determined that Wake County has the biggest chunk of those outstanding absentee ballots, with 15,081. Mecklenburg County is close behind at 15,000, followed by Guilford County with 6,752, Forsyth County with 5,506 and Cumberland County with 4,226.
If any of those absentee ballots is missing the required witness signature or has another problem that can't easily be fixed, it's too late to issue a new ballot, so the vote won't count, Brinson Bell said.
"All of the eligible ballots have already left voters' hands," she said.
An undetermined number of provisional ballots were cast Tuesday by voters for various reasons, she said, including if they showed up at the wrong precinct, were voting after 7:30 p.m. at sites kept open late or because records showed they had already voted when they said they hadn't.
Brinson Bell noted that only 900,000 people cast ballots Tuesday – a low turnout for Election Day – so the number of provisional ballots could be smaller than usual.
"We'll just have to see how those numbers shake out," she said.
WRAL anchor/reporter Adam Owens contributed to this report.
