North Carolina’s largest counties get more time to count ballots

In North Carolina, the state’s biggest counties would get a longer runway to finish counting some ballots, and voters with certain absentee ballot problems would get more time to fix them. The change applies only in counties with more than 250,000 registered voters, where provisional official ballots could be counted as late as 5:00 p.m. on the fifth business day after the election.

That is later than the current third-business-day deadline and it matters because close contests often turn on ballots that arrive with a missing signature, a mismatched form or some other defect that can be corrected if the voter has enough time.

A later finish line for the biggest counties

The bill gives counties different counting deadlines depending on when an absentee ballot arrives. Ballots received on the Monday before election day would have to be processed by 7:30 p.m. the day before election day. Absentee ballots received before election day would have to be counted and reported by 7:30 p.m. on election day.

Absentee ballots received on election day in those larger counties could be counted and reported later, up to 5:00 p.m. on the fifth business day after the election. Provisional official ballots in those counties would also move to that same later deadline.

More room to cure a ballot

The same extra time would apply to voters trying to cure certain absentee defects. Instead of losing the chance to have a ballot counted because the clock ran out too fast, those voters would have until 5:00 p.m. on the fifth business day after election day to fix the problem.

For county election boards, that means more work stretches beyond election night in the places with the largest voter rolls. For voters, it means a fixable mistake would not automatically end the ballot’s chances.