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Governance
Multiple state legislative races are likely to see recounts, but Democrats are confident they have broken the supermajority in the NCGA. Races where the difference between candidates comes down to less than a percentage point after provisional ballots are counted are subject to recounts if a candidate requests one. In the NC House, where Republicans are falling one short of the 72 seats needed for a supermajority, Democrat Brian Cohn initially led incumbent Republican state Rep. Frank Sossamon by 182 votes, or half of a percentage point, in a district that covers Vance and Granville counties. Other close contests include Democrat Dante Pittman’s race against Republican Ken Fontenot in Nash and Wilson Counties, which he was initially up by 2 percentage points, and Democrat Nicole Sidman’s race against Democrat-turned-Republican Rep. Tricia Cotham in Charlotte, where Sidman was initially behind by 275 votes. NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs is also behind in her race by just 0.14% and is likely to request a recount, even though experts say it is unlikely to change the outcome.
Voting Rights
On Wednesday the NC State Board of Elections conducted a post-election audit in which two randomly selected sets of ballots from each county were hand counted and compared with voting machine counts. This audit is legally required as a measure to check machine counting reliability.
More than 60,000 provisional ballots were cast in the election, including over 6,000 in Wake County and over 5,000 in Mecklenburg County. Local election boards must determine which provisional ballots will be counted by November 15, when they are required to certify the vote. The largest portion of provisional ballots were cast in cases where someone who showed up to vote did not appear on the voter rolls (23,211 cases). In 1,625 cases, voters who failed to show photo ID were told to show one at their county board of elections prior to the end of business on November 14 (usually because they have an ID but forgot to bring it with them to vote), and advocacy groups are now reaching out to those voters to remind them that they need to present ID for their provisional ballots to count.
The week before the election the state Court of Appeals rejected Republicans’ efforts to not count some votes of overseas military family members. Republicans had sued, claiming that some overseas voters were ineligible and should not be registered, but both a trial court and now the state Court of Appeals denied their claim and said they had provided no evidence that ineligible voters were registered. Separately, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the voter purge case that had partially been sent back to state courts must instead remain in federal court. Republicans had asked the courts to require the State Board of Elections to purge 225,000 voters from the rolls by September 6, which would have conflicted with the federal law that prohibits kicking voters off rolls within 90 days of an election.
With a 77.6% “yes” vote, voters approved the proposed amendment to change language in the NC Constitution about citizenship requirements for voting. The language about who is allowed to vote in NC will change from “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” to “only U.S. citizens.”
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