How to Read the Election Returns (and when) | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dan Way, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

State Board of Elections will post results of absentee/early voting Tuesday soon after polls close; other results will be updated through the night

    Soon after the polls close in North Carolina tomorrow night, you're likely to see millions of votes reported immediately on the State Board of Elections' website (found here), and then very little change in those totals for an hour or longer. What's going on?

    The Elections Board site will be updated throughout the night, spokesman Patrick Gannon said, but the tallies you see initially will be from "in-person absentee" or early voting sites. The Elections Board reported a record absentee turnout, with more than 3.1 million absentee ballots cast at early voting sites or by mail. Roughly 100,000 absentee ballots have been requested but not returned as of late Saturday. By the end of day Friday, more ballots had been cast in early voting than in the similar period for the 2012 election. Overall, 45.2 percent of the states' 6,864,841 total registered voters voted before election day.

    Early voting ended Saturday, and tabulations of those ballots, which were cast at various sites around the state starting on Oct. 20, should be completed by election night.

    "Those are the first results that will be posted," Gannon said, which should be on the board's website shortly after the polls close statewide at 7:30 p.m.

    Mailed absentee ballots from those who didn't want to go to an Election Day polling site, along with mail-in votes from civilians who were away from home on election day, voters residing overseas, and military personnel will be blended into the election night vote totals.

    "Some that have already been received will be probably posted [online] around the same time that the early voting totals are" on Tuesday night, Gannon said.

    "Some [mail-in ballots] won't even come in until after Election Day ... so they will be counted in throughout the process," Gannon said. "But most of them will be counted on election night at some point."

    Ballots that were cast on Tuesday will start to show up in the online live feed "somewhere in the 8:30 range" Tuesday night, Gannon said. As others get counted they will be included as well.

    All voting precincts must report back to the county boards of elections before a county can submit its results to the state. And that is where some delays in reporting county vote totals could occur.

    "Some counties will report a lot quicker than others. There are some of them that may still be coming in after midnight" because the counties are so geographically large, and precincts so spread apart, Gannon said.

    "If there's a long line when the polls close, people that are still in line can still vote, so there may be some cases where people are still voting well past 7:30," when polls are scheduled to close, Gannon said. That could push back the time by which county boards get the results, and prepare them for submission to the state board.