The game clock stopped on Nov. 5. Now we’re in overtime.
Don’t know about your states, but we’ve got a recount scheduled to start on Tuesday.
As counties tabulated remaining absentee and provisional ballots, Democrat Allison Riggs took the lead late Friday by 106 votes in the NC Supreme Court race. At the end of election day, she was down by over 7,000. As of this writing, there are still several counties yet to upload their final tallies that don’t plan to complete their work until Monday. So more to come.
Upside? Blue counties left to report voted 455k of their citizens. Red counties voted only 172k. The vast majority are already counted. What’s left are the handful that need approving by the county boards.
Remember the fierce 2023 battle in Wisconsin for the state supreme court seat won by Janet Protasiewicz? These local and state races matter. But like Rodney Dangerfield, they largely get no repsect. It’s why we station poll greeters outside polling stations urging voters to vote their ballots all the way to the bottom. Many don’t. Downlballot races suffer. We are still reeling from N.C. Chief Justice Cheri Beasley’s 2022 loss by 401 votes. Holding Riggs’s seat (she was appointed by Goc. Roy Cooper in September 2023) means maintaining the current 5-2 (R-to-D) balance from which Democrats hope to build. People’s rights hang on it.
Then there are the voting changes year after year (WRAL):
Some ballot officials won’t count this year, in a change from years past, are any mail-in ballots that arrived after polls closed.
For years the state allowed mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day and arrived within three days of the election, a grace period that acknowledged the slow and sometimes irregular pace of mail delivery. But Republican state lawmakers eliminated that grace period ahead of the 2024 elections, saying it was necessary to improve voters’ confidence in election results. It was also likely politically helpful to the GOP; recent shifts in voting habits have led to Democrats being more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.
Around the state, it’s possible that thousands of voters had their ballots invalidated due to the new rules.
Wake County officials, for instance, say they received 616 mail-in ballots that would’ve been counted in the past but couldn’t be counted this year.
Yes, I’m an elections geek.