[Just crawling out from a recent illness. Baby steps here for the moment.]

The race between North Carolina's controversial and divisive Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Roy Cooper, is very close. Out of about 2.5 million ballots cast, Cooper leads in the currently reported results by just 4,972 votes (or 0.11%), with tens of thousands of provisional ballots being tallied throughout the week before Friday's state certification.

The failure of a widely used paper-ballot optical scan computer tabulation system has made the outcome of the close race even murkier.

"McCrory had the lead all of election night until 94,000 votes were reported late in Durham County. After that, the tide turned and Cooper secured the lead," WFMY reports today, from the state where both Donald Trump and incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Richard Burr were reported to have won their statewide races.

The Democrat Cooper, as is the habit of both Republicans and Democrats these days, used the slim lead to declare "victory" in the gubernatorial race on Election Night, well before the results were either canvassed or certified.

As Raleigh's News & Observer reported on Saturday: "Gov. Pat McCrory, trailing in a close race for re-election behind Attorney General Roy Cooper, claims there was 'malfeasance' in tabulating votes in Durham County and 'irregularities' reported around the state. Cooper's campaign said nothing improper happened in Durham, and accused McCrory of trying to undermine the election."

The paper reports: "About 90,000 votes weren't counted until late on Election Day. Durham officials said it was due to malfunctioning equipment that led to a backlog, and that it had no impact on the votes cast. ... McCrory's campaign staff said on Saturday that those ballots came from at least five early voting sites and one general election site in Durham County and appear to have been tabulated from corrupted memory cards. The cards could not be properly read by the system and the computers 'experienced a critical error,' according to the campaign."

"In Durham, the county was unable to upload results on Election Night from six electronic memory cards that save ballot data," WNCN reports. "But Durham was able to print out a tape log of the results and entered them manually. A petition has been filed to recount those votes."

For the record, Durham's Board of Elections (like all of the state's county Boards of Election, while a Republican serves as Governor) is majority GOP. The county votes on hand-marked paper ballots, tabulated at the precinct (either correctly or incorrectly, we can never know unless the ballots are actually counted by humans) by ES&S Model 100 optical-scanners. The M-100s, as we reported as long ago as 2008, have a storied history of failure. In 2008, for example, as we explained at the time, election officials in Oakland County, MI informed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that during testing, the ES&S system "yielded different results each time" the "same ballots were run through the same machines".

The NC GOP is now demanding ballots cast in Durham County --- which reportedly leaned very heavily towards Cooper as well as Hillary Clinton (approximately 3 to 1 in both cases) --- have its ballots "recounted", following the computer tabulator memory card failures on Election Day...

It's not for nothing that North Carolina Republicans are working so hard to keep certain people out of the voting booth this November.

North Carolina's Republican Governor Pat McCrory's chances for re-election took a direct hit after the U.S. Supreme Court recently denied his emergency request to stay a unanimous decision by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeal. The 4th Circuit three-judge panel struck down a massive NC GOP voter suppression law that, the court found, had targeted Democratic-leaning African-American voters "with almost surgical precision."

McCrory now faces a reelection bid against a strong Democratic opponent who is not shy about calling the longtime Duke Energy CEO turned Governor to task for an environmental scandal (Ash-gate) that likely ranks second, in recent times, only to the poisoning of Flint, Michigan's drinking water.

McCrory's Ash-gate vulnerability was previously touched upon by Desi Doyen in a February 2015 Green News Report. After covering both a massive spill of 39 tons of toxic coal ash into North Carolina's Dan River in February 2014 and criminal charges leveled by federal prosecutors against Duke Energy for violations of the Clean Water Act in relation to the company's North Carolina projects dating back to 2010, Doyen quoted a report from WRAL-TV Raleigh (emphasis added):

McCrory's Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, has served as NC's elected Attorney General since 2001. He is not only well-positioned to appeal to those whose very right to participate in our democracy had been threatened by McCrory's failed, Jim Crow-like voter suppression scheme, but has also launched a powerful TV ad (video posted below) highlighting the latest revelations concerning whether the McCrory administration may have fraudulently concealed the dangers to public health posed by the presence of Duke Energy's toxic coal ash in their drinking water...