In the 2024 North Carolina primary elections, 1,647 ballots were not counted because voters either didn’t have a photo ID or didn’t return their absentee ballots by the deadline, according to data that Carolina Public Press requested from the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
Elections were finalized and the state board voted unanimously on March 26 to certify the results in the state.
This means that of the 1.8 million North Carolina voters who voted in the 2024 primaries, the votes of 0.09% of the voters did not count because they didn’t meet the new voting requirements.
Both Mac McCorkle , a professor of the practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and Christopher Cooper , a professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University say the pool of voters in primaries doesn’t necessarily predict a major issue of implementation of the new laws in the general election and it remains to be seen.
“The numbers do not seem to be striking,” McCorkle said. “The difference between the primary and general election is that the primary electorate is way smaller.”
But the number of ballots not counted in primaries have increased slightly compared to the 2020 primaries. In 2020, only 800 ballots were not counted and marked as “returned after deadline,” according to the state board’s public information director, Patrick Gannon . There was no photo ID implementation in 2020 so provisional ballots were not an option and there was more time for absentee ballots to be counted.
What ballots didn’t count and why?
Of the total 1,647 ballots that were turned away in the primaries, 477 provisional ballots did not count because of the new voter ID requirement and 1,185 absentee ballots didn’t count because they were returned after the deadline for absentee ballots, according to the data from the board.
Due to the new voter ID requirement, 1,185 voters who did not have a photo ID cast provisional ballots, or about 6 of every 10,000 ballots cast were provisional.
The majority of the provisional ballots, or 697 ballots, were counted. For voters who went to vote in the wrong precinct and had to cast provisional ballots, only 11 ballots were partially counted for the contests the voter was eligible to vote in, while 477 provisional ballots did not count at all.
Election offices received 1,170 absentee ballots after the election day deadline, preventing them from being counted in the primaries, according to state board data. Of those ballots, 467 were cast in the Democratic primary, 423 were unaffiliated ballots, 277 were Republican ballots and 3 were Libertarian.
This was the largest election since the implementation of the new voter ID law in August 2023, when early voting for municipal elections took place. Critics of the requirement and voting rights organizations say the requirement makes it more difficult for minority voters to cast ballots successfully.
This was also the first major election since the legislature passed a new law last year to shorten the three-day grace period for absentee ballots to a 7:30 p.m. deadline on election day for all voters, except for military and overseas ballots.
Before this change, state law provided a three-day grace period if ballots were postmarked on or before election day and received within three days after an election.
Only small fraction of votes not counted
The number of ballots turned away in the primaries was small and not necessarily indicative of a larger problem, according to Cooper and McCorkle.
“This is not a massive portion of the electorate and the ID exception forms seem to work pretty well,” Cooper said. “The vast majority of the time it was accepted.”
The number of votes counted is the majority of the ballots that were cast and there is no evidence that one party was advantaged or disadvantaged more than the other with photo ID implementation, he said.
Cooper said he’s interested in seeing what the General Assembly decides on the use of the ID exception form because it seems like there is some appetite to tamp down the use of the exception forms, according to him.
The pool of voters in the primaries is smaller, but during a presidential election, the electorate in the general election expands dramatically, according to McCorkle, who has also previously worked as a political consultant.
“Even if the numbers aren’t striking right now, you cannot necessarily say this pattern is going to hold up in the general election,” he said. “We’ll have to wait until the general election to really know.”
The voter ID issue sparked a lot of controversy in the state, but McCorkle said there is a preliminary sign that there may not be a significant ideological or party bias in its implementation.
“This may be a kind of tempest in the teapot on both sides,” he said.
Having fewer votes counted is not in the interest of either political party and would only affect their ability to have candidates elected, according to McCorkle and Cooper.
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