More than 2 million North Carolinians have submitted absentee ballots or turned out to cast their ballot since in-person early voting started a week ago, with Republican voters edging out registered Democrats for the first time Thursday.
It took North Carolina about four days to cross the 1-million-vote mark after early voting began Oct. 17. On Oct. 24, the state had doubled that number, with just over 2 million ballots cast. The vast majority of those ballots — 1.9 million — were cast in person. The State Board of Elections has received 103,945 civilian absentee ballots, 12,000 overseas ballots and 3,500 or so military absentee ballots. Early voting has been underway for nine days at 420 sites across the state.
That’s about 26% of North Carolina’s 7.8 million registered voters. Because of a lag between when a voter casts a ballot and when county election boards upload their data to the state, the numbers continued to climb into Friday, when the SBE’s daily vote tally showed about 2.29 million ballots cast, or just under 30% of the state electorate.
With 11 days to go until the election, State Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell said everything is running as planned and the personnel and infrastructure are in place across the state to hold an efficient election and counting process on Nov. 5.
“We have seen some lines in some parts of the state since early voting began, but overall, this has been an extremely smooth first half of the early voting period,” Bell told reporters during an online forum Friday. “This is a testament to the preparations by the dedicated election professionals across our state and the dedicated poll workers who staff these voting sites in service to their neighbors and community.”
Factoring in increases in registered voters between 2020 and 2024, in-person early voting is up 0.4% over 2020, when a large percentage of voters submitted absentee ballots as a precaution to the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point in the 2016 election, only 1.2 million votes were cast, of which 1.1 million were cast in person during early voting.
Though registered Democrats showed up in large numbers in the first few days of early voting, registered Republicans have edged them out in the raw number of ballots cast. The SBE is not counting for whom these ballots were cast, only tabulating the number of registered voters who have submitted a ballot or been to the polls so far.
As of Friday morning, 789,047 registered Republicans had voted compared with 772,899 registered Democrats. Another 723,139 unaffiliated voters also had cast ballots as of Friday, according to the SBE daily vote tally. About 34% of registered Republicans have voted compared with about 32% of registered Democrats in the state.
