NC’s election results won’t be final for another week as officials urge patience
North Carolina will not finish counting votes in the presidential and state elections until local elections boards process outstanding mail-in and provisional ballots next week, according to state elections officials.
The process, spelled out in state law, means the winner of North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes for president likely won’t be known until next Friday, Nov. 13.
President Donald Trump is leading Democratic challenger Joe Biden in North Carolina, but The Associated Press has not called the race as of Wednesday with 116,200 outstanding mail-in ballots, plus an unknown number of provisional ballots, none of which will be counted until next week. Earlier in the day, the State Board of Elections said there were 117,460 outstanding absentee ballots.
Trump wrote a number of misleading tweets throughout the day Wednesday, incorrectly implying that election officials in various states make up vote totals to help Democrats.
Damon Circosta, the chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, urged people to have patience as the state’s votes are counted, and then audited as is normal, to make sure the results are accurate.
“As has been our constant refrain this election season, our job is to get the count right, as fast as we can — but above all correct,” he said in a press conference Wednesday.
Trump currently leads Biden by 76,701 votes in North Carolina, according to unofficial tallies provided by the N.C. State Board of Elections. That means the balance of the race could potentially change as all the votes are counted next week — not to mention other races like those for attorney general or chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, which are within even smaller margins.
The number of provisional ballots — which voters cast when there’s a question if they’re eligible to vote, or if they showed up at the wrong precinct or ran into some other problem — should be known late Wednesday or early Thursday.
It’s not known how many of the mail-in ballots will actually arrive; people can request a mail ballot but decide not to vote. The ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day and received by Nov. 12 to be counted.
Similarly, it’s unclear how many of the provisional ballots cast will eventually be counted. Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said that in 2016 around 61,000 people cast provisional ballots, and after a review, around 27,000 were counted.
The wait for final results come as more than 5.4 million of 7.3 million registered voters in North Carolina cast their ballots. About 4.5 million ballots were cast before Election Day: roughly 3.6 million through one-stop early voting and more than 950,000 by mail.
Timeline for counting votes
And while counties are allowed to inform the public of how many ballots come in over the next week or so, they can’t open up those ballots and count them until their already scheduled meetings.
In response to reporters’ questions about the timeline Wednesday, Brinson Bell said that “in most cases the counties are going to be meeting Nov. 12” or on Nov. 13.
That means the results won’t change much between now and Nov. 12 or 13 “with very few exceptions,” Bell said.
Even then, the results won’t be official. State officials won’t finalize the vote tallies until Nov. 24, three weeks after the election, as is common.
“We will continue the same processes of chain of custody, reconciliation, auditing,” Brinson Bell said, calling that process “steps we have taken for decades.”
There’s a chance for Biden to gain ground in the state, where data show he had an edge with those who voted by mail.
Too close to call
But Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, said on Twitter it’s unlikely that all 116,200 outstanding ballots will be returned.
“If ALL of the (116K) ... (not likely) are returned & accepted AND break 67-31, then that MAY put Biden’s totals POTENTIALLY within 34K of Trump’s totals,” he wrote.
Despite no winner being called, Trump declared victory early Wednesday.
“We’ve clearly won North Carolina, where we’re up 1.4%, or 77,000 votes with only approximately 5% left,” he said. “They can’t catch us.”
The number of voters who chose to mail in their ballots this year was more than five times the number in 2016. Elections officials anticipated the higher number because of concerns about voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic.
Nationwide, Biden led but neither candidate yet had enough electoral votes to win, as tight races remained in North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 8:50 AM with the headline "NC’s election results won’t be final for another week as officials urge patience."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the percentage of yet-to-be-counted ballots Biden would need to win in North Carolina.
