Rep. Ty Harrell has been living outside his district for at least a month.

Harrell said he has been living at a friend's house in North Raleigh, more than four miles from his district, District 41. Harrell's wife, Melanie Dupon, sued him for divorce in July over an alleged extramarital affair.

Harrell said he was trying to secure a permanent residence back in his district and planned to move back "within a reasonable time period, as soon as possible."

The state Constitution requires that legislative candidates reside in the district they seek to represent for at least one year. That has been interpreted to mean that office holders must be registered to vote at a residence in their district.

However, under state law a person's voter registration is still valid if they move to another address for "temporary purposes only, with the intention of returning." The law gives no time limit for "temporary."

Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, said she did not think Harrell was violating the law as long as he intends to move back within his district.

Harrell's Jaguar was parked in the driveway at his friend's house Wednesday. The legislator answered the door around 1 p.m. wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts.

More after the jump.

   Comments (2)

North Carolinians reported few problems at the poll, the AP reports:

Out of nearly 3,000 precincts, voting hours were extended past the scheduled close of 7:30 p.m. at only a single polling place. Voting began about 30 minutes late at a community center in Wake County after the grandson of an election judge drove away with site’s ballots in his trunk. That site will stay open for an extra hour.

There were some lines at polling places in the day’s early hours, as those headed into the office cast a ballot before their workday began. But North Carolina’s largest counties reported little or no waiting at polling sites as the day wore on, a sign that the rain and the overwhelming turnout in early voting was easing the typical Election Day strain.

"I think we’re going to exceed 70 percent (turnout) ... but I don’t think 80 percent," said State Board of Elections Deputy Director Johnnie McLean.

State elections director Gary Bartlett heard about the RNC conference call today saying that voter registration fraud is rampant in North Carolina, and wants to clarify the state board's position.

The state elections board takes voter fraud seriously, but organizations have the right to participate in voter registration drives, Bartlett told Lynn Bonner.

"Certainly, when someone tries to commit fraud...it does slow us down, there is no doubt about that, but we have to balance everything," Bartlett said. The suspicious forms are "just a small portion of many things we’ll be reviewing."

The state has not finished its investigation into the bogus registration forms submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, he said, but it appears so far that the people who submitted them were motivated by "personal greed," not partisan politics.

"It doesn’t have anything to do with them supporting or opposing any cause," he said.

Update: Deputy Director Johnnie McLean told the Charlotte Observer that the bogus forms appear to have been filed by "a lazy worker" hired by ACORN. She says she does not see any evidence of voter fraud.

"For somebody to say that with no apparent evidence to support it, it just doesn't do very much to establish trust in the elections process," she said.

The number of registered Libertarians has more than doubled.

But don't get too excited — it's only gone from 5 to 11.

As recently as Monday, the State Board of Elections reported only a handful of people registered to the political party, which was only re-recognized in late May.

Deputy elections director Johnnie Mclean said that the state board only recently got the forms together to allow people to re-register, so it will take a while before the party bounces back.

No word yet on whether Mike Munger is one of the 11. 

The labor commissioner runoff will cost between $3.5 and $5 million.

The cost will be shared by each of the 100 counties participating in the runoff between John C. Brooks and Mary Fant Donnan, though some may pay more if other local races drive turnout, said State Board of Elections deputy director Johnnie Mclean.

In previous primary runoffs, turnout has been as low as 3 percent and as high as 16 percent, though Mclean estimates it will be at the lower end.

Under state law, the runner-up may request a runoff if no candidate receives more than 40 percent of the vote. Brooks, who received 24.4 percent of the vote in a four-way race, came in second to Donnan, who received 27.5 percent.

He said he requested a runoff because it is an "educational opportunity."

"The people of North Carolina would have known nothing more about the issues in the Department of Labor than the man in the moon," he said. "The opportunity to save billions of dollars for the people of North Carolina could have gone by, just like it did four years ago."

Brooks also dismissed the idea of instant-runoff voting, in which voters' second-choice picks are counted if no candidate gets a majority. The towns of Cary and Hendersonville held instant-runoff elections last fall under a pilot program.

State auditor Les Merritt said today that the State Board of Elections had an apparent conflict of interest when it hired the spouse of a top official.

Merritt's report concerns Johnnie McLean, chief deputy director of the State Board of Elections, and her husband, who was hired in March as a temporary voting equipment employee. Merritt found that McLean was not supervising her husband, Robert McLean, and that since he was a temporary employee, state law did not specifically bar the board from hiring him.

However, the state personnel office "recommends that state agencies also attempt to avoid nepotism when hiring temporary employees," Merritt wrote. "We recommend that the Board of Elections avoid hiring related temporary employees in the future to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest."

On April 21, Robert McLean's assignment with the board ended, Gary Bartlett, executive director of the elections board, wrote in his response to Merritt's report. Bartlett wrote that the state's temporary employment agency twice told Robert McLean that he could work for the board if he didn't report to his wife.

More after the jump.

   Comments (0)

More than 120,000 voters have registered since the end of the year.

Roughly half of the new voters have registered as Democrats, a little more than a third are unaffiliated and about 13 percent are Republicans, according to figures from the State Board of Elections.

Overall, the number of voters increased by about 2 percent to 5.7 million, Rob Christensen reports.

"It started back in late December," said Johnnie McLean, the deputy state elections director. "It's obviously due to the presidential primaries."

Barack Obama's campaign is registering voters this week on college campuses, at shopping centers, in high schools and in restaurants in an aggressive push to meet Friday's deadline to register the traditional way.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is taking a different tack. It is focusing on a new North Carolina law allowing people to register and vote simultaneously at early voting stops between April 17 and May 3.

"From an efficiency standpoint, we are going to be running one of the most aggressive voter registration efforts in North Carolina history," said Mike Trujillo, Clinton's state field director.