N Carolina counties won’t finish count Friday

The announcement comes just after a protest was filed saying a political action committee funded by the Democratic Party paid people in Bladen County to fill out absentee ballots favoring Democrats, including McCrory’s opponent, Roy Cooper.

Despite the ongoing race, Democratic candidate Roy Cooper has continuously claimed victory over McCrory. County canvasses were supposed to be done by Friday, but all have been delayed at least until next week. The deadline to complete that process is Friday, but officials have indicated that they might not be finished by then, according to Raleigh television station WRAL.

Most of the questions raised by the McCrory campaign center around voters – many of them African American – who said they registered at the Division of Motor Vehicles and public assistance offices, but whose names did not appear on voter rolls on election day.

A DMV official said the agency provided information related to requests covering more than 8,000 driver’s license numbers.

Formal protests are now being filed in 11 additional counties to challenge potentially fraudulent absentee ballots cast for Roy Cooper and other Democrats, according to Governor Pat McCrory’s campaign.

Marc Elias told reporters Friday that trailing Republican Gov.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, however, has praised McCrory for his “political courage” and “moral clarity” in refusing to cave to pressure from the sports organizations, as well as celebrities and businesses that have refused to do business in North Carolina because of the HB2 law. A lot of politicians lost hard races in 2016, and Pat McCrory is the only one dragging his heels and being petulant. Now, however, 10 days later, it’s increasingly clear that there is a metastasizing Republican effort underway to steal the election from Cooper for the incumbent Pat McCrory.

McCrory’s campaign is supporting fraud allegations that voters are pursuing in more than half the state’s counties.

The North Carolina Republican Party’s top attorney says with thousands of votes yet to count, Gov.

The Republican-majority Durham County elections board is dismissing a GOP lawyer’s bid to recount 94,000 votes. Board members approved 78 of those ballots, with Cooper gaining 40 votes and McCrory gaining 33. These votes had to be manually counted because of technical issues at their originating precincts. Stark says those races are very much up in the air.

In the 2016 Election, Democrats won on a straight ticket, gathering no less than 66 percent of the vote in every category among the Durham County electorate.

If the McCrory campaign has enough evidence of voting irregularities to call for a contested election and the race between McCrory and Cooper remains too close to call, the North Carolina House of Representatives would be the final decision-maker in who occupies the governor’s mansion for the next four years.

But challenges over the validity of hundreds of votes and reviews of provisional ballots are expected to delay the reports from many, if not all, of the state’s 100 counties, elections officials said.

Once the counties complete their canvass, the State Board of Elections confirms the tallies in a meeting set for November 29.

Apart from the hearing scheduled for Wednesday, the board will meet Thursday evening to review provisional ballots.

More than 60,000 provisional ballots were cast on Election Day or during early voting.

The fresh fraud complaints, while focused on Bladen County, could serve to stoke doubts about the ballot-counting statewide.