I live in Guilford County. It leans fairly heavily Dem—59-39 HRC in 2016, and the mayor of Greensboro is a Dem who won her last reelection 67-32. It stands to reason that there are more left than right leaning people making the calls on the ballots here, so it would seem odd that they’d be rejecting black ballots more frequently than in the rural areas of NC. Unfortunately, I wonder if there’s another explanation. Having lived in three other midsize or larger cities, an impression that I have of this area is that it seems to have the lowest percentage of educated blacks of anywhere I’ve ever lived. I don’t have numbers to back that up, so take it with a grain of salt, but it certainly has been that way I. My personal interactions. There are definitely far fewer blacks in the suburbs here than in Charleston, Atlanta, and even Columbus. My first guess, having lived here for 6 years, would be that the less educated voters are making more mistakes on their mail-in ballots, this causing more to be rejected. I’d think that would be true anywhere, but as I said, it feels like this area’s undereducated population skews more heavily black than most places.
