Since I work closely with early voting data across the country, a few observations about NC and elsewhere
NC is perhaps one of the most transparent states in the country. They have a centralized election management system that local election officials use to track absentee ballots, early voting, voter registration, etc., all available on a public ftp site dl.ncsbe.gov/?prefix=
On the other extreme there are states where each locality runs elections. Take Alabama. When we called local election officials for their absentee ballot counts we literally were told that they had to look in a folder so they could count them (when someone would return our call)
No guarantee when a statewide election management system is available, local election officials use it. When I asked local election officials why absentee counts in their state system didn't match a federal report, some officials told me they didn't trust/use their state system
My colleague @electionsmith has taken a lot of heat from Florida local election officials for misinterpreting absentee ballot data in their system. But it is not that his analysis is wrong - local election officials aren't keying in the data properly aclufl.org/en/publication…
In the successful Gwinnett County, GA litigation I was involved with, Gwinnett county election officials claimed in their defense that they weren't necessarily rejecting more absentee ballots than other counties, the other counties just weren't entering absentee data
So, yeah, NC has a great election management system. There are other states that follow best practices, too. But there are a lot of places out there with questionable data management practices, and I worry that the worst offenders are the ones that we can't easily monitor
