Red mirage, blue mirage? In North Carolina, there was a turnout mirage.
After record-breaking early voting numbers, Election Day turnout struggled to keep up.
By 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, with 92 counties reporting completed unofficial results, only nine counties had surpassed their overall 2020 turnout.
Even more unexpected, a majority of counties that did outdo 2020 were counties in the Helene disaster zone: Haywood, Madison, Transylvania, Polk and Watauga counties.
The greatest increase from 2020 was Madison County, which went from a 76% turnout rate in 2020 to a 77.7% rate this cycle.
As of Tuesday morning, North Carolina, considered a crucial swing state nationally, had been on track to meet or exceed 2020’s record turnout, which reached 75% of registered voters.
Throughout this election nationwide, voters, elected officials and candidates alike have agreed on one message: this election is extremely important. North Carolinians appeared to have taken this to heart during early voting.
After early voting and the second-to-last day of absentee voting were complete, turnout had already reached 57%.
While the result was a quieter Election Day in many areas of the state, with shorter turnout lines and less stressed poll workers, turnout came up short of expected levels at the end of the day.
Across North Carolina, the election did generally go smoothly without any particular incidents, State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said Tuesday afternoon. But there were a couple minor changes.
Minor hiccups across thousands of precincts
The State Board of Elections conducted an emergency meeting mid-afternoon to address minor issues at two precincts, out of the state’s over 2,600 polling places.
The Gardners School precinct workers in Wilson County had an early morning issue printing authorization to vote forms, and did not use planned backup procedures — a manual process to fill out the forms.
Between 6:40 a.m. and 8:07 a.m., voters were unable to vote. The chief judge said about 10 people left and four returned, but wasn’t entirely sure. Poll workers did not get contact information for those who left.
Others may or may not have decided not to come vote because they heard what was going on, State Board of Elections General Counsel Paul Cox said.
Under state law, the State Board may extend closing times for polling places if there is a delay of more than 15 minutes at any point in the day. They can add up to as many minutes as were lost. While voters lost nearly an hour and a half to the delay, board members agreed that extending that long would burden workers without adding much opportunity for those who plan to vote.
“I’m not sure you would accomplish anything by being open from eight to nine,” Board member Siobhan Millen said. “I mean, how many people are really going to come back at that late date?”
Millen suggested keeping polls open an extra half hour, and the Board unanimously agreed.
Across the state in Burke County, the Pilot Mountain precinct in Morganton also experienced a delay. A sworn affidavit from former Burke County Republican Party chair and candidate for office Brian Barrier alleged that the polling site was closed from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. or 7:10 a.m. Barrier said at least seven voters left due to the delay or the line that had accumulated by the time voting began.
Burke County Election Director Kenny Rhyne was told a slightly different story by poll workers, who said IT showed up to fix a laptop boot-up situation by 6:46 a.m. and fixed it within ten minutes. The chief judge also didn’t know how many voters were impacted, but felt it may have been zero.
The Board voted 4-1 to add a half hour to the polling sites hours, with Board member Stacy Eggers objecting.
In addition, several counties saw unusually late counting of votes.
By 12:30 a.m., several counties were still holding out on unofficial results. Craven, Cumberland, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Montgomery and Rockingham were nearly tallied, but Alamance and Carteret had zero precincts reporting still. Those mostly did come in over the next few hours.
State Board of Elections spokesperson Pat Gannon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what had happened in those counties.
Turnout in Helene-impacted counties
One region that didn’t appear to face any major issues was the majority of the Helene disaster area.
In October, the State Board passed a number of emergency measures to ensure voting went on as normally as possible after the natural disaster. The General Assembly later codified most, and extended the measures to 25 impacted counties.
The final measures included the possibility of moving voters to a different Election Day precinct, and moving precincts within or outside of their original county. Voters could vote at the county board of elections instead of their assigned precinct.
In the end, four counties used temporary, secure tents as polling sites on Election Day. Yancey County used four, while Buncombe, Burke and Haywood used one.
At least one temporary roadway was constructed to each tent structure by Election Day, even in the most isolated communities.
When will North Carolina have election results?
Brinson Bell expected 98% of ballots to be unofficially counted within the midnight hour Wednesday morning. Her prediction proved essential correct.
Once every voter in line at 7:30 p.m. voted at a given precinct, the polls closed. At that point, election officials were able to upload absentee-by-mail results of absentee ballots returned by the day before Election Day.
Then, they they were able to close early voting tabulators, and begin uploading those. Due to a recent change in law, early vote results took longer to be posted. Before, they were allowed to be pre-processed like absentee ballots.
Election Day ballots had to be returned to the county board of elections in person. There are different driving distances from precinct sites to county boards of elections, and Brinson Bell expected the bulk to arrive between 9 and 11 p.m.
“It’s going to feel a lot like the State Fair traffic when we had a concert going on at the same time,” she said earlier Tuesday. “There’s going to be some bottlenecks, and everybody just needs to have patience.”
Remaining votes, which could affect a few very close contests, will be addressed in the 10-day, post-election canvass period. Elections officials will review provisional ballots to determine eligibility. Brinson Bell said they’ve seen an uptick in provisional ballots, as it is the first year the voter ID laws are in place.
Voters were able to cast provisional ballots if they did not have a photo ID or if their eligibility was uncertain for another reason. They may return their photo ID at a later point to the county board of elections, before the canvass, or fill out a photo ID exception form if their ID was lost due to a natural disaster or other limited exceptions.
Election officials will also count absentee ballots returned on Election Day, absentee ballots returned to other county boards of elections by Helene-impacted voters due to emergency voting measures, and military and overseas citizen absentee ballots that were sent by Election Day, but returned to the proper county board of elections between Election Day and Nov. 14 at 5 p.m.
Those are all expected to be relatively small numbers, but if an election is close, they may determine who wins or loses. So, it’s possible that some races on the North Carolina ballot may not be decided until Nov. 15. And if they are very close even then, they could be subject to a recount.
Regardless, no election results are official until the canvass.
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