North Carolina’s swing

Despite Barack Obama’s success in registering tens of thousands of voters this summer, he might not have won North Carolina without its new law allowing same-day registration and voting before election day.

Obama took the state -- the first Democrat do to so in more than three decades -- by an unofficial margin of 13,692 votes over John McCain. There are some provisional ballots left to count, but they are not expected to significantly change that gap.

Nearly 92,000 people registered during the early-voting period, which opened after the registration deadline for election-day voting had passed. And those voters, according to an Associated Press review of registration and exit poll data, were a huge well of support for Obama.

Democrats out-registered Republicans 2 to 1 at the early-voting sites. Roughly 35% of the late registrants were black, in a state where blacks are 22% of the population. Exit polls indicated 95% of African American voters in North Carolina cast ballots for Obama.

Andy Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University, said late registrations make a difference only when the margins are close. The 2008 numbers strongly suggest they made the difference for Obama.

“It does seem amplified in a year like this, when you see them breaking all one way and the race was particularly close in the state,” Taylor said.

North Carolina is not one of the seven states that allow voters to register on election day, but it is one of eight that allows early voting and absentee voting without providing an excuse. And Democratic state lawmakers approved adding same-day registration to early voting in 2007, over some Republicans’ objections that lax identification requirements could lead to voter fraud.

This year’s primary and general elections were the first time the law was in place for a statewide election.

Of the 92,000 who registered during the early-voting period, but more than two-thirds had never voted in North Carolina.

Such late registrants are particularly valuable, because campaigns are able to lock up both a person’s registration and vote in one stop. That bypasses the traditional drawback of voter registration drives, which requires a campaign to both sign up a voter and then -- weeks or months later -- turn that new voter out to cast a ballot.

Obama’s campaign focused heavily on getting voters to the polls during the early-voting one-stop period, and he carried an advantage of 180,000 votes going into election day.

Overall, nearly 970,000 people filed new or updated registrations in the state this year.

Obama’s campaign helped two other top Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket -- Bev Perdue, who was elected governor, and Kay Hagan, elected senator.

Preliminary data show that the number of presidential votes cast here this year jumped by nearly 21% from 2004. That could end up among the biggest gain of any state.

Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, an independent elections watchdog, said that although campaign intensity matters the most, the one-stop voting law had a substantial effect on both the record turnout and the election’s results.

“It’s a tool of empowerment for people who missed the deadline but still want to be engaged in the election,” he said.