— Over the last five years, North Carolina election officials referred 570 potential voting irregularities to prosecutors, most of them cases where someone voted despite a recent felony conviction.

In more than 80 percent of these cases, prosecutors either declined to prosecute or the case is pending, its future unclear as a district attorney weighs its merits.

There have been 45 convictions. There are another 40 cases where the suspect was indicted and awaiting prosecution, according to records released this week by the State Board of Elections in what will become an annual report.

"In North Carolina, elections violations are neither widespread nor non-existent," the board said in an explainer document provided with compilations of the cases. "They involve a very small fraction of those who participate in elections. Elections violations are most often isolated events that are typically not coordinated and are not confined to any single political party. "

The State Board of Elections released the figures in response to numerous open records requests that followed the absentee ballot shenanigans in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District race last year, which forced a do-over election this fall and led to criminal charges in an inquiry that continues today. The state board had referred very similar allegations, involving some of the same people, to federal prosecutors after the 2016 election, and though there was follow up, no charges came until the same scheme played out again in 2018 and the state board did its own second investigation.

In the fallout, former election officials said they had referred irregularities to prosecutors over the years, only to see them linger. Local prosecutors, who get the bulk of the referrals, said the cases often proved complex, with witnesses whose stories shifted. Typically there weren't many votes involved.

With heightened interest now, the state board plans to release data annually tracking referred cases, spokesman Patrick Gannon said this week. It released spreadsheets this week for each year going back to 2015, and WRAL News combined that into one spreadsheet.

All but about 90 of the 570 cases in the spreadsheets deal with felons who voted before their probation or parole was up, which is illegal under North Carolina law. Most of those cases emerged from an audit the state board performed in 2017, Gannon said. Some of those voters would later say they didn't know they couldn't vote and that they were surprised local election officials let them.

In response, the State Board said it updated software to improve the check on felony status and data sharing between counties and changed registration and authorization to vote forms to make the rules more obvious.

Prosecutors in many counties declined to move on these cases, though others were more aggressive. Prosecutions in Alamance County drew national attention, and felony charges against "The Alamance 12" were eventually knocked down to misdemeanors.

The state NAACP and others filed a lawsuit last month challenging North Carolina's felony disenfranchisement law, saying people shouldn't be kept from voting while on probation or parole.

The State Board of Elections has an investigative team, and the board can issue subpoenas, but neither the board nor its staff handles criminal prosecutions.

The state budget lawmakers passed this summer included $200,000 a year for a pilot project to help local prosecutors move forward on election cases. It would have brought in an "investigative consultant" to work with local district attorneys, but Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the budget as part of a broader fight with the General Assembly's Republican majority over Medicaid expansion and education funding.

Republicans have since passed a series of mini-budgets to fund various priorities, but the elections funding wasn't included.

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WRAL investigative reporter Tyler Dukes contributed to this report.