A blogger
posted the question: Why were so many voters who thought they were on the rolls in Granville County given provisional ballots because they were not on precinct list in North Carolina? The answer, suggested in a comment points to 911 and geocoding.
From talking with Don Wright, attorney at the State Board of Elections, it appears that Granville County has a problem in some precincts where people's names have not been included on the printout of the poll book. This is because the county's 911 system hasn't correlated hundreds of addresses to a GIS coordinate, and the GIS coordinate is what the state elections database system uses to assign voters to the correct precinct. So active voters, particularly with a Hwy 96 or Hwy 56 addresses, did not getting [sic] a precinct assigned to them in the voter registration database. When the county goes to print the pollbooks, precinct by precinct, these voters names don't get printed on any precinct's books.
I've looked at database now and there are roughly 600 voters in this situation.
Some cry conspiracy. I'm impressed folks figured this out so quickly.