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NC will be ahead of curve on tallying votes on election night

With two weeks to go until Election Day, more than a quarter of all voters in North Carolina have already cast their ballots.

Posted Updated

By
Laura Leslie
, WRAL Capitol Bureau chief
RALEIGH, N.C. — With two weeks to go until Election Day, more than a quarter of all voters in North Carolina have already cast their ballots.

More than 1.4 million people have cast early, in-person votes since last Thursday, and elections officials statewide have accepted another 658,000 absentee ballots that have been mailed in, according to the State Board of Elections. The combined total of nearly 2.1 million is 28.4 percent of the state's 7.3 million registered voters.

With some many votes coming in before Election Day, North Carolina will be far ahead of other states on what could be a long election night.

State law allows absentee ballots cast both by mail and in person to be approved over the course of five weeks at each county’s elections board meetings. Those ballots are scanned into a tabulator and recorded, but the vote totals aren't counted up.

"At no point do we instruct that machine – do we turn it or press the button telling it to tabulate the results," state elections director Karen Brinson Bell said Tuesday. "We do not do that until Election Day."

The recording of each ballot is stored on a hard drive that matches up with that ballot. Both the hard drives and paper ballots are then locked up until Election Day, when local elections officials read the hard drives and officially tally the votes.

Some people have expressed concerns that those results could be hacked, but Brinson Bell said hackers cannot access the data.
"No component of our voting system is allowed to be connected to the internet. That is law, and that was practice even before it became law," she said.

County elections officials started contacting voters Tuesday whose mailed absentee ballots haven't been accepted due to problems. Those voters will have a chance to correct the problems or cast new ballots before Election Day so their votes will count.

Early voting was already the state’s most popular way to vote before the coronavirus pandemic, which is driving record numbers of voters to use it this year. Because state law allows those ballots to be processed in advance, Brinson Bell said the results – expected to be a sizable majority of the total votes cast – will be reported as soon as polls close on Election Day.

"That leaves us with the returns from the precincts on election night," she said. "We actually think we may only have 20 to 30 percent of the voters participate on Election Day, so that should be pretty manageable."

Laws in a number of other states prohibit elections officials from processing mailed ballots before Election Day, which will slow down results for a large chunk of votes.

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