North Carolina
100 counties that count and one state that publishes — plus an appointed election chain of command, judges with party labels, and the Senate race the whole country is watching.
Who's winning the open Senate seat?
State deltas
Every state has hair. Here is North Carolina's.
The rules that make this state different from the last one, what each breaks if you assume the national default, and how the engine resolves it.
Pipelines built for county-by-county scraping do a hundred counties of unnecessary work here — and can still miss the real prize: a public depot of per-precinct results, absentee files, and weekly voter snapshots back to 1990. The trap is subtler: files before mid-2018 use different delimiters and merged vote-method columns.
The engine ingests the state depot directly with the published layout files, and branches its parsers at the 2018 format break. County sites are cross-checks, not sources.
No county elects an election chief. Five-member appointed boards run each county — and after a December 2024 veto override, the State Auditor, not the Governor, appoints the State Board and every county chair. Officeholder feeds keyed to the old appointment chain churned mid-cycle in 2025.
County election administration is modeled as appointed office with the appointing authority as a dated attribute — Governor through 2024, Auditor from 2025. No election-chief race will ever appear in a results file.
October 2025's SB 249 redrew the 1st and 3rd districts on top of the 2023 post-Harper map — two remaps in three years. "NC-01" in 2024 and "NC-01" in 2026 are different ground, and precinct-to-district joins keyed on district number silently corrupt history.
District geometry is versioned by plan — the 2023 map for 2024 results, SB 249 for 2026 — with the state's own shapefiles attached. Nothing joins on district label alone.
Early, mail, and provisional votes land first in administrative precincts — bookkeeping rows, not places — and only weeks later does a separate precinct-sort file redistribute them to voters' home precincts. Precinct analysis on night-of files systematically understates turnout everywhere people actually live.
Administrative precincts are first-class rows keyed by the state's own real-precinct flag, and every contest re-ingests when the precinct-sort files land. Two truths, both dated.
Unaffiliated is the biggest registration bloc — 3.1 million, 40% — and each unaffiliated voter picks either party's primary ballot. Registered party and ballot pulled are different facts. And in June 2025 four de-recognized parties' registrants were force-moved to unaffiliated, putting a cliff in every longitudinal series.
Registered party and primary ballot chosen are separate fields, and party recognition carries effective dates — the June 2025 discontinuity is modeled, not smoothed over.
551 municipalities elect in odd years under four statutory methods — and in runoff-method towns the general is in October with the runoff on November election day. A date-based election typer inverts the general and the runoff.
Each municipality carries its charter-chosen method, and September–November odd-year events are linked stages of one contest lifecycle, not independent elections.
Every court from district court to the Supreme Court elects on partisan ballots — restored by statute for the 2018 cycle. National schemas that hard-code judicial races as nonpartisan or expect retention elections drop the party field or mis-model the contest outright.
Judicial contests are ordinary partisan contests here, party labels straight from the state feed, with a per-state judicial-election-type flag doing the work schemas usually hard-code.
The 2024 Supreme Court contest was decided by 734 votes and certified in May — after 60,000+ ballot challenges crossed four courts. The aftermath is live: a Registration Repair project has ~82,000 voters completing missing ID numbers, and non-responders vote provisionally in 2026. Provisional volume will spike in identifiable counties, and races called before litigation windows close can be called wrong for months.
No North Carolina contest is marked final before state and federal challenge windows close, provisionals are carried as a late-settling column with the Friday-noon cure deadline modeled, and the repair cohort is tracked by county.
Federal to conservation district
What North Carolina actually elects.
The seats run bottom-heavy here too — and North Carolina's midterm is the county year: every sheriff, every clerk, most prosecutors, and all 170 legislative seats vote in 2026 while the Council of State rides the presidential cycle.
Congressional map
Where those seats are.
The 14 congressional districts in force for the 2026 cycle — not necessarily the map this delegation was elected under. North Carolina enacted SL2025-95, first used in 2026.
| District |
|---|
| NC-01 |
| NC-02 |
| NC-03 |
| NC-04 |
| NC-05 |
| NC-06 |
| NC-07 |
| NC-08 |
| NC-09 |
| NC-10 |
| NC-11 |
| NC-12 |
| NC-13 |
| NC-14 |
County ledger
A hundred counters, one printing press.
County boards count and transmit; the State Board publishes one live feed and one open depot for all of it — local contests included. Thirteen of 100 shown; every row reads from the same state files.
| County | Feed vehicle | Precincts | Contests | Status | Last read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wake | Vendor app | 204 | 34 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Mecklenburg | Vendor app | 195 | 31 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Guilford | Vendor app | 165 | 28 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Forsyth | Vendor app | 101 | 25 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Buncombe | Vendor app | 79 | 22 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Cumberland | Vendor app | 75 | 23 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Durham | Vendor app | 57 | 21 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Union | Vendor app | 52 | 18 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Gaston | Vendor app | 46 | 18 | Verified | 2 hr |
| New Hanover | Vendor app | 43 | 19 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Pitt | Vendor app | 40 | 17 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Hyde | Vendor app | 7 | 9 | Verified | 2 hr |
| Tyrrell | Vendor app | 6 | 8 | Verified | 2 hr |