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 — UpdatedMore 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.
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.
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.
"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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