In the Oct. 7 municipal primary elections, 462 Durham voters cast a provisional ballot—by far the highest number in the state. Cumberland County logged the second-highest amount with just 70 provisional ballots, while Guilford County logged the third-highest, at 56.
Derek Bowens, the director of elections for Durham County, is not worried about the high numbers.
“I am not concerned by this,” he wrote in an email to The 9th Street Journal.
Yet this sentiment is not shared by all Durhamites.
“What’s concerning, of course, is that Durham is the bluest county in the state,” said Gunther Peck, a professor of history at Duke University and co-lead of the Student Voting Rights Lab. “It makes you wonder…. I do worry it feeds the sense of anxiety and mistrust that voters have, because it looks partisan, even if it’s not.”
A provisional ballot is a temporary ballot that voters may cast when their eligibility is in question. Voting advocates worry about large numbers of provisional ballots because many of those ballots can go uncounted.
In the 2020 election, nearly 80% of provisional ballots cast by North Carolina voters aged 18-25 were ultimately rejected.
“Duke’s getting hammered by provisional ballots,” said Peck, the Duke professor.
Some provisional ballots do end up counting. Voters can check the status of their provisional ballot 10 days after the election through the state Board of Elections’ online tool. Of the 462 provisional ballots cast in Durham’s Oct. 7 primary election, 354 were ultimately approved and counted. The other 108 ballots were rejected.
Those are small numbers compared with the 25,000 ballots cast in the Durham primary. Yet in local elections, a few hundred votes can be enough to affect an outcome. In the 2024 contested state Supreme Court election, Democrat Allison Riggs won by just 734 votes.
Peck noted that in the recent primary, 63 of Durham’s 462 provisional ballots were cast during early voting.
“The whole point of early voting is for people with any irregularities to fix the problem,” he said, “and then to cast a legal ballot.”
Several potential causes lie behind Durham’s unusually high number of provisional ballots.
“The vast majority of provisional ballots cast during the 10/7 primary election were associated with voters presenting at the incorrect precinct,” Bowens, the Durham elections director, said in an emailed response.
Provisional ballots were also issued when voters failed to present an acceptable ID, or due to ineligibility to vote in the city election (for instance, county residents who do not live in the City of Durham).
Durham’s mobile population may also play a role, said Emerson Kirby, the chair of the Durham Democratic Party. So may the state Board of Election’s efforts to “repair” voter registration. Over 3,700 Durham voters are currently on the state board’s Registration Repair Project list. If they remain on the list, they can only vote using a provisional ballot.
“We’ve got a lot of folks moving here, we’ve got a lot of students coming in,” said Kirby. “I think that paired with the registration repair makes it so that we see a higher number of provisional ballots, especially relative to other counties in the state.”
Kirby said the Durham Democratic Party is committed to registration repair efforts. “We’re helping our precincts continue their registration repair efforts after the municipal elections to make sure that we’re getting as many folks off of that list as possible,” she said.
