RALEIGH (AP) — All the counting was supposed to be all but over today, but North Carolina’s too-close-to-call governor’s race remains nowhere near done, the State Board of Elections said Thursday.

Some of the canvassing will not be done until next week, including in Robeson County, where McCrory’s camp has said fraud occurred.

Election officials say delays in receiving information from the Department of Motor Vehicles are causing many of the problems. A federal judge ordered that votes of people who signed up at DMV offices must be counted unless the agency proves they refused to register.

Lots of formal local challenges also are postponing final totals as state board figures late Thursday showed Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper leading McCrory by about 4,600 of the nearly 4.7 million votes already tallied.

Counties are still working through formal election protests, supported by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s campaign, that question early in-person vote totals and challenge whether some mailed-in ballots were forged by supporters of Democratic candidates.

Late Thursday afternoon, G.L. Pridgen, director of the Robeson County Board of Elections, said no protests had yet been filed at his office.

“… They did come by today and we allowed them to review, so it’s not that we’re keeping them from it,” Pridgen said. “We allowed them to review all the absentee ballots. We did not have any formal protests here.”

By today, all 100 counties were supposed to finish deciding whether to count or set aside more than 60,000 mailed-in absentee and provisional ballots statewide, unseal the voters’ choices and send updated vote totals for dozens of races to the State Board of Elections.

More than half of the counties, including the highest-voting Wake County, held meetings Thursday to work through piles of ballots. By late Thursday, board spokesman Pat Gannon said “many, if not all” of the counties won’t finish before by today’s canvass deadline.

Pridgen said the Robeson County Board of Elections voted to move the provisional ballot count to Tuesday at 10 a.m. and the county canvass will be moved to Wednesday at 11 a.m.

Steve Stone, chairman of the Robeson County Board of Elections, said he had heard McCrory’s campaign had alleged that different political action groups had organized mail-in absentees and there were many questionable absentee requests in envelopes.

“We’re still in the process of getting provisionals approved or disapproved, or whatever the case may be at the local Board of Elections,” Stone said. “We have to do absentee and provisional approvals before we can ever do our canvass, which is our visual announcement of our official totals.”

Any questionable absentee or provisional ballot will be looked into, Stone said, adding that it is the responsibility of election officials to examine each ballot, and if they see something that does not look normal to report it to the State Board of Elections

Stone said he knew there were cases of people coming to North Carolina from out of state who were not registered in North Carolina and were under the impression that they could vote for president here because they could not get home to vote.

“One couple said they had to come here for a death in the family all of a sudden and they couldn’t make it back to Virginia to vote,” Stone said. “They were told they could vote here by provisional.”

Stone said the rules are to not turn anybody away, but if they are not registered properly, they are given a provisional ballot.

“Will it count? Probably not,” Stone said. “That’s the process they are going through now.”

If the provisional is not approved, the ballot is never taken out of the envelope — not counted.

“All counties have to go through this absentee approval process and the provisional approval process and scrutinize the ballots to determine if they should count or should not count, one way or the other,” Stone said. “Then we put those ballots in the machine and add to our unofficial number, whatever the total would be. Until we canvass, nothing is official.”

Cooper declared himself the winner on election night, and said he expects the final certified results to favor him. Cooper’s spokesman, Ford Porter, noted Thursday that McCrory’s DMV is to blame for the latest delays.

Races for state auditor and a handful of legislative seats also remain too close to call.

Gannon said election officials need the DMV to produce information about people who cast provisional ballots because they weren’t listed on voter rolls, despite saying that they registered or updated their registration at driver’s license offices since last year.

Gannon said it now may be this weekend before the process involving the DMV-related ballots would be completed. He didn’t have a number of how many such ballots there were statewide.

A pending lawsuit accuses the DMV of failing to send registration requests to the board. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs said last month that these votes should count unless the DMV shows the voters affirmatively refused in writing to register.

State law allows counties to delay their canvass meetings for “a reasonable time thereafter.” Any delays could push back a possible recount, which the trailing candidate can request if the margin is 10,000 votes or less. The state board is supposed to certify final results and declare winners Nov. 29, but courts or possibly the legislature could get involved if uncertainty remains beyond then.

The delays at the DMV forced the Wake County election board to delay the start of its decision-making on 6,800 provisional ballots they must review. Provisional ballots also are cast for other reasons, such as missing or mismatched information about a potential voter.

In a Raleigh warehouse where Wake County’s ballots are secured, board members spent Thursday morning signing off on counting more than 3,000 mail-in ballots and determining the choices on some damaged ballots.

“Every vote is always very important and we take our jobs very seriously,” board Chairman Ellis Boyle said. “Is it important this time? Sure, but it’s important every time.”

Durham County’s election board scheduled a hearing Friday to consider any evidence showing its early-voting ballots could have been miscounted on election night after tired workers had to transcribe the results of some 94,000 votes due to equipment failure.

McCrory’s campaign manager Russell Peck said allegations of rampant voter fraud must be investigated “before the results of the election can be determined.”

Without offering any details late Thursday, the McCrory campaign announced that voters are filing protests in 50 counties alleging fraud through ballots cast by dead people, convicted felons or individuals voting more than once.

Asked by The Associated Press to present evidence for the allegations, the campaign offered challenges in Guilford County filed by a Greensboro voter, who claims that a dead person in High Point cast a ballot. The same voter also identified eight convicted felons whom he said voted without having had their voting rights restored, as well as nine people he accused of voting in multiple states.

Porter said McCrory “has set a new standard for desperation in his attempts to undermine the results of an election he lost.”

Robeson to canvass next week

Gary Robertson

Associated Press

Staff writer Terri Ferguson Smith contributed to this report.