A brief thread of North Carolina-specific election data while I sit here in court

Several Democrats – including attorney friends of mine – are concerned about the sub-head on this news story and "down" turnout of black voters

I'm not sure that line's accurate tbh

The # of voters who identify as "African American / Black" has declined in both absolute numbers and as a % of the NC electorate since 2016

Election Day 2016: 1,536,117
Election Day 2020: 1,515,756
Change: -20,361

A part of that drop is just folks dying and being removed from the polls (we have a fairly uniform process for "cleaning" voter rolls over time)

But a bigger part of it is in a change made to North Carolina's voter registration application, adding an option to pick "Multiracial"

The catch, though, is that the State Board of Elections doesn't have "multiracial" as an output line on the data they make public

Anyone who picks Multiracial – or Asian / Other / nothing at all – gets lumped into the "Other" category

Which has more than doubled since 2016

So, for example, if you obsessively follow @ElectProject's early voting data like I do, you won't see a "Multiracial" turnout line – because it doesn't exist in the public NCSBE data, even though it's a selectable option on voter registration forms

My totally speculative suspicion is that a significant # of voters who've changed parties / moved / etc in the past 4 years – folks identified as "black" in 2016 – are now in the Multiracial / Other bucket

And folks who update their voter registration are more likely to vote

So in 2016, you had roughly 979Kish non-Hispanic black voters cast ballots (64% of 1,530,967)

So far in 2020, 884Kish have already voted early (58% of 1,515,756)

But the "Other" group of voters has cast 481.6K ballots so far in 2020, way up vs all 2016 Other votes (~343K)