Following up on my post from this morning, linking to Democracy NC’s new report, I received the following response via email:

The 30K to 50K estimate is not based on assuming an equal number of voters who used same-day registration or out-of-precinct voting in North Carolina’s 2010 midterm would have done so in the more contested election of 2014, but certainly many thousands who would have, maybe even more – we’ll never know.

We should have explained more clearly that the estimate is also based on hotline calls, news articles and field reports from hundreds of poll monitors in all the large counties and many smaller ones who saw thousands of voters leaving long lines, being sent away from polling places, etc.  At just one polling site, the monitors counted over 300 voters leaving without voting. We’ll be reviewing these reports in more depth and checking the lists some monitors gathered of names of voters leaving to see what percent actually voted at another precinct.

So our “preliminary report” is a work in progress with some ballpark numbers to indicate the seriousness of the impact of the new law. The real point is not whether it’s 15,000 or 50,000 but that the new rules, along with the confusion and lack of preparation related to those rules, led the election process to become dysfunctional in too many ways, in too many places, and harm too many voters.

Bob Hall and Isela Gutierrez, Democracy North Carolina