North Dakota

NDCC § 16.1-01-04.1 requires identification at the point of voting rather than enrolment beforehand, and accepts exactly two primary forms: a North Dakota Department of Transportation licence or ID card, or an official identification issued by a tribal government to a tribal member residing in the state — which makes tribal governments an issuing authority for the state's only voter-verification mechanism. There is still a central voter file and a per-precinct voter list, so the absence is of the registration act, not of the list. Every schema with a required registration date, registration status or party enrolment has nothing to put in those fields for this state.

With no registration there is no natural denominator, so the state defines one: Eligible Voters means the Census Bureau's annual estimate of residents aged 18 and over. That population includes non-citizens and others who cannot vote, and in a county of a few hundred people the estimate's error is large relative to the count — which is why the official 2024 results report Billings County at 98.21% on 658 ballots and Sioux County at 38.52%. Any comparison of a North Dakota turnout rate against a registration-based rate elsewhere is comparing two different measurements that share a name.

The state's own 2026 guide gives township elections as any day between March 1 and March 31 at the discretion of the township board, and school district elections as any day between April 1 and June 30 at the discretion of the school board. With 1,305 township governments and 173 school districts, the local layer is more than a thousand independent election days. Home rule cities may also set their own date rather than use June 9. A calendar keyed to statewide dates finds five in this state and misses the rest.

County offices are listed as depending on structure, and the combinations are real seats: Auditor, or Auditor/Treasurer, or Auditor/Treasurer/Tax Director; Recorder, or Recorder/Clerk of District Court; Treasurer, or Treasurer/Recorder, or Treasurer/Recorder/Clerk of District Court, or Treasurer/Tax Director. The same set of functions therefore maps to a different number of elected positions in each county, so no statewide count of county offices exists and none can be derived by multiplying 53 by anything.

The state's 2026 office list places Official County Newspaper among the county offices on the ballot, with a four-year term, alongside the sheriff and the state's attorney. Voters elect a newspaper. Anything that assumes an elected office is held by a natural person — a candidate record with a birth date, an incumbency status, a campaign finance filing — has no place to put it, and any name-matching pass will try to resolve a masthead to a human being.

Director of the Southwest Water Authority is marked Primary Election Only and appears in six counties; Supervisor of a Soil Conservation District is marked General Election Only and carries a six-year term. So the June and November ballots are not the same ballot with different stages — they carry different tiers of government. Harvesting one and assuming the other is a superset of it loses a whole class of office in each direction.

Southwest Water Authority director seats are apportioned by county, except that Morton County elects one director within Mandan and one outside the city limits, and Stark County elects one within Dickinson and one outside. The electoral unit is therefore a county partitioned by a municipal boundary — neither the county nor the city, but the remainder of one after subtracting the other. Garrison Diversion Conservancy District directors are apportioned across eleven named counties on a different pattern again.

Every election from 2008 through the November 2024 general lives on the old portal, addressed by opaque per-election tokens, and reports precinct counts — 385 statewide in 2024, with per-precinct ballots cast. The June 2026 primary and the November 2026 general live on a new portal with a different addressing scheme and no shared identifier, whose published runtime configuration sets showPrecincts and showPrecinctTurnout to false. Its own resource links for precincts, candidate lists and absentee statistics point at a third host that now says it is no longer active, with an empty election-id parameter. A longitudinal series across 2024 and 2026 has to bridge two systems, and the newer one publishes less.