Roy Cooper, the Democratic attorney general who challenged McCrory, declared victory on Nov. 8 when results showed him 4,500 votes ahead. But since then, Republicans have challenged ballots in several counties, and begun laying the groundwork to contest the election further — even as additional counting has increased Cooper's lead to around 6,000 votes.

“This race has simply gotten away from Pat McCrory,” said Marc Elias, the recount lawyer working for Cooper, in a call with reporters today. “He's not going to be the next governor, whatever tactics his campaign comes up with.”

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But as The Washington Post's Amber Phillips reported last week, Republicans were not conceding the race. Since then, the party has highlighted allegations of voter fraud in rural Bladen County, which broke for Republicans up and down the ballot. On election night, McCrory appeared to win the county with 8,272 votes to Cooper's 7,227 votes. But this week, a successful local candidate in a nonpartisan race, McCrae Dowless, filed a challenge to what Dowless said were “literally hundreds of fraudulent ballots,” alleging that “the handwriting on hundreds of those ballots matches only about a dozen handwriting styles.” The clue, he said, was the number of ballots writing in a rival candidate's name.

“This is the shocking evidence resulting from a blatant scheme to try to impact the voting results of an entire county and perhaps even sway statewide and federal elections,” he wrote.

Dowless speculated that the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, which had received $2,500 from the state Democratic Party, had cooked the ballots; Deborah Monroe, a witness to many of the signatures, had been paid by the PAC. At no point did Dowless suggest that Monroe, the PAC, or anyone else had been trying to help Cooper, but McCrory's campaign quickly seized on the complaint.

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“Hundreds of absentee ballots appear to have been fraudulently cast for Roy Cooper and other Democrats,” the campaign said in a statement. “Initial evidence shows that a North Carolina Democrat Party-funded group may have paid people to cast fraudulent votes to tip this election to Roy Cooper!”

As the News & Observer reported, a quick analysis found that 167 — not hundreds — of absentee ballots seemed to contain the handwriting of seven people — not one person. At the same time, McCrory's campaign filed challenges in 11 more counties, including Durham, where a late report of tens of thousands of ballots on Nov. 8 put Cooper in the lead.

In a short interview Friday, McCrory strategist Chris LaCivita spoke confidently about problems being uncovered as the campaign probed ballots. “We found several dozen voters who are on parole or in prison who have voted,” he said. “There's dead people who have voted. There's people who have double-voted. And that's not even starting on the 90,000 early votes they just sat on until election night in Durham County.”

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But Democrats have found refuge in two issues created by Republicans. First, thanks to some of McCrory's own reforms, every county election commission is run by two Republicans and one Democrat, allowing the Democrats to accuse the governor of attacking his own election monitors.

Second, McCrory's campaign has fumbled a series of challenges in the contended counties. Romeo Johnson Myrick, the Republican who filed a challenge in Halifax County, misremembered the timing of the hearing, and showed up after it ended. Challenges Friday in Wake and Durham counties, among the most populous and Democratic in the state, were largely rejected by the elections panels.

“I've been involved in representing people on winning ends and losing ends of close elections,” said Elias after a round of Cooper wins. “It's unfortunate to see that rather than accepting election results, Pat McCrory is going to go down by besmirching Republican election officials and the voters of North Carolina.”

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But the steady accusations of mass fraud may be setting up an almost unheard-of challenge, one that looks unlikely unless the margin closes to fewer than 1,000 votes. The Carolina Partnership for Reform, a group run by Republican operative Bob Harris, has raised the precedent of 2004, when a Republican candidate for the state's chief education job trailed by 8,500 votes. He challenged 11,000 provisional ballots on the grounds that they might have been cast in the wrong precincts. Democrats, including Attorney General Cooper, rejected the challenge.

“Cooper and McCrory may indeed be headed for a court fight,” wrote Harris this week. “But if the Atkinson precedent is followed, the legislature may have the final say. Then we’ll see if the Democrats are content to follow the rules they wrote.”

The problem with the precedent is that the 2004 legislature stepped in when the Democratic nominee held a lead. Today, both Cooper and the party's candidate for state auditor hold leads. A successful McCrory challenge might depend on the count ending with him in the lead, or with questions about more ballots than the ballots that make up Cooper's margin of victory.

Elias said Friday that this was unlikely, and that even if every challenged ballot was tossed — and every one had been marked for Cooper — the Democrat would win.