RALEIGH, N.C.  – Barack Obama’s effort to register tens of thousands of voters this summer was widely successful.

But the president-elect may not have won North Carolina without the help of a new law that allowed voters to both sign up and cast a ballot during state’s early voting period.

Obama became the first Democrat to win North Carolina in more than three decades. The unofficial margin without the tally of provisional ballot stands at 13,692 votes over Republican nominee John McCain.

Nearly 92,000 new voters registered during the early voting period, which opened after the traditional registration deadline for Election Day voting had passed. Democrats outregistered Republicans at the early voting sites by a margin of more than two-to-one.