Voting has begun in North Carolina after a two-week delay for counties to reprint ballots without RFK Jr.’s name on them. With that start, we will also start our regular Monday election data dump posts featuring information on North Carolina’s 2024 election.
Voter Registration Changes
North Carolina usually experiences a surge in voter registrations in the weeks ahead of the general election, and 2024 is no exception. This year’s surge started the week of July 21.
Both Democrats and Republicans are gaining registrations at about half the pace of 2020, while unaffiliated registrations are rising a little under 50% more in 2024 than in 2020.
You can keep up with registration trends at Voter Registration Changes on the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Elections page.
The current surge is part of a familiar pattern of “lumps” in the voter registration record when combined with list maintenance in January, as can be seen in the four previous presidential elections.
A (Way Too Early) Look at Election Returns
No sooner did county election officials send ballots out than they received some ballot returns.
As seen at Vote Tracker on Locke’s Carolina Elections page, county election boards accepted 73 ballots on September 20 (the day officials sent out mail ballots), and another 29 were accepted over the weekend.
Most or all of those ballots were either federal write-in ballots, or ballots returned online. North Carolina is one of the states that allows military and overseas voters to return ballots by email. Blind or visually impaired voters can use an online portal to vote (online voting for the general population is a bad idea).
Absentee Ballot Requests
Jim Stirling did an extensive look at absentee ballot requests in his September 18 post:
The growth between 2016 and 2024 favors Democrats, but they don’t have the advantage that they had over Republicans in 2020. Both Democrats and unaffiliated voters have seen an increase of over three times the number of requests that they had at this time in 2016, while Republicans have only seen their requests double.
Here is a snapshot of requests as of today with comparisons to a similar point in 2016 and 2020, provided by the North Carolina State Board of Elections:
The difference in the total makes it difficult to compare from one election to the next, so here is a comparison by percentage:
There was rough parity between the parties in 2016, but Democrats dominated mail ballot requests in 2020. The parties regressed back somewhat in 2024, but Democrats retain a significant advantage in mail ballot requests. Unaffiliated requests have risen each election as their proportion of the electorate increased.
We will post election data at Locke every Monday through election day.
