County election boards across North Carolina were scheduled to finalize results by Friday, but many local boards need more time.
North Carolina law allows counties to extend their canvass, if needed. Election officials say postponing a canvass is necessary when certain decisions have not been made regarding provisional ballots or if certain types of election protests are pending. Counties are working on tallying the more than 60,000 provisional and absentee ballots that were cast, but there are several other factors complicating the process.
Most notably, there's still the undecided race between Republican Governor Pat McCrory and Democratic challenger Roy Cooper.
McCrory currently trails Cooper by roughly 5,000 votes.
The McCrory campaign is already pointing to election problems in Durham County, where polls were open late due to technical problems during the day.
Earlier this week, the campaign filed a protest in Bladen County over fraudulent absentee voting. It alleges that the handwriting is the same on multiple mail-in ballots with a straight-ticket vote for Democrats. While it's legal to help someone complete a ballot, that has to be indicated on the ballot.
On Wednesday, the McCrory campaign filed complaints in 11 other counties.
There's also the issue of a recent court ruling involving some voters who registered or updated their address at the Division of Motor Vehicles. Some of them believed they were registered through the agency but weren't included on voter rolls.
Patrick Gannon with the North Carolina Board of Elections says they're working closely with the DMV to verify information.
“Right now, we're in the process of getting that information from the DMV on who has declined voter registration services at the DMV, so we can match those up with the people who cast provisional attesting that they registered at the DMV,” says Gannon.
The state is now scheduled to certify all the results on Nov. 29, but the final outcomes could be delayed for up to 10 days after that.
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