Cooper announces transition team, Democrats pressuring McCrory to concede

About two dozen protesters stood outside the entrance of a building hosting the latest State Board of Elections hearing on contested ballots in the North Carolina’s governor’s race. Cooper, meanwhile, has a chorus of Democrats in the state asking McCrory to concede the loss considering it has been two weeks since the election and Cooper’s narrow lead has grown in that time.

“We have a lot to do”, Cooper said.

The outgoing attorney general unveiled Monday his transition team and a web site for people interested in working in his administration.

But even Republican-led county election boards were not sold on the legitimacy of his concerns and rejected his calls for a recount.

Fox News reports officials in Bladen County have observed “overtly similar” handwriting on hundreds of absentee ballots for a separate local supervisor’s race, the victor of which filed a formal complaint.

There were 97,753 same-day registrants in North Carolina with the following political party breakdown: Democrats, 34,484; Republicans, 33,550; Libertarian, 857; and Unaffiliated, 28,862. McCrory’s team has filed a series of challenges to vote tallies, but those filings have been largely “dismissed by Republican-controlled county elections boards as either factually incorrect or unproven”.

What’s not unlikely is that if Cooper prevails, Republican lawmakers will at least have succeeded, in their minds, in attempts to cast Cooper’s victory as a product of a cloudy election, thus trying to cast doubt on Cooper’s legitimacy as a governor.

The dispute between McCrory and Cooper has delayed the certification of official results for elections across the state while the gubernatorial contest is resolved. Cooper’s campaign said Monday that his lead has grown to almost 8,000 votes as county board of elections incrementally process mailed-in and provisional ballots. Though McCrory’s campaign had pushed for the consolidation, the board declined to intervene, saying it would only hamper the process.

The ballots have all been counted, but the canvassing has yet to be completed.

Most NC county’s elections departments are dominated by Republicans at a 2-1 ratio and NPR is reporting over 100 complaints around such voting issues as what McCrory spoke of. “The media has certainly covered the constitutional provision that gives the General Assembly the authority to weigh in on that, but given that the elections are not finalized at this point, I think further comment would be premature”, Moore told Colin Campbell. The county board rejected the challenge, noting that hand counting is a normal option in these cases. “It is clear that Gov. McCrory has no path to victory, and that Cooper’s margin of victory will only grow stronger as final vote totals continue to come in”.

One bright spot for Democrats on November 8 was that they were able to pick up a governorship in North Carolina, an office that had been held by Republican Gov.