Update: Clinton Leading in North Carolina

With more than 60 percent of the state’s vote counted, Hillary Clinton has a slim lead in North Carolina, though it is still too early to call the winner.

Clinton currently has a three-point lead, with 50 percent to Donald Trump’s 48 percent, according to CNN’s live coverage. However, a large number of the counties not yet counted are rural ones expected to lean toward Trump.

Clinton has led the lion’s share of public opinion polls there for the last several months, but early voting analyses show that the Democratic nominee has performed worse in the state than President Barack Obama did in 2012, while Trump has outperformed that year’s GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

The North Carolina Board of Elections extended voting in eight precincts by between 20 and 60 minutes, depending on the area, following technical difficulties in several precincts that forced many polling stations to switch from their electronic voter check-in system to paper roll books and drastically extended wait times for many voters.

“As a result of these events, voting in Durham County was interrupted at multiple sites for at least one hour,” Democracy North Carolina, a nonprofit group that sued the county earlier on November 8 to extend voting hours, said in a statement.

Both candidates have campaigned hard in North Carolina, slinging attack after attack at one another in the days leading up to the election, following close poll results in the state.

“The best way to repudiate the bigotry and the bluster and the bullying and the hateful rhetoric and discrimination is to show up with the biggest turnout in American history,” Clinton told supporters at a Raleigh, North Carolina, campaign event on November 3, according to the Washington Post.

And Trump told voters at his own rally that a Clinton win “would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government.”

According to CNN, if Clinton takes North Carolina, Trump will need to win every other competitive state in order to become the nation’s next president.

Sources: CNN (2) (3), Washington Post / Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr