Voting underway in US state of North Carolina for presidential election 2020

 North Carolina  mail ballots to voters

The 2020 US presidential election has begun with North Carolina becoming the first state to start mailing out absentee ballots on Friday, two months before Election Day. President Trump and his main challenger Joe Biden are in the race. American voters will decide who will be next American president. 

Other states will begin doing the same over the next few weeks in an election that's expected to break all records in the number of ballots cast early and by mail. Minnesota will be the first state to offer early in-person voting starting Sept. 18, with many states following not long afterward.

Most analysts believe that at least half the electorate will vote by mail or early in person, largely because the pandemic has made many voters reluctant to show up at potentially crowded polling places on November. 3.

Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, had one request as the balloting begins.

"What we do need to ask of our voters is to be patient," Bell said Thursday. "This is unprecedented, the number of absentee by mail requests that we have received." She said the ballots will be sent out on a "rolling" basis.

North Carolina has logged more than 643,000 requests already, far outstripping previous years. By this time in 2016, fewer than 39,000 North Carolinians had asked for an absentee ballot. In North Carolina, 337,362 Democrats requested ballots as of Friday, compared with 103,620 Republicans and 200,359 unaffiliated voters.

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