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DURHAM, N.C. — Democrats and Republicans in this fiercely contested political battleground have regularly resorted to creative legal maneuvers and election-law changes in their efforts to wring every last vote from the state’s nearly seven million voters. But even by that standard, the disputed, hairbreadth race for governor is plowing litigious and acrimonious ground.
Scrambling to save the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, Republicans said they were pursuing protests in about half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, alleging that fraud and technical troubles had pushed the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Roy Cooper, to a statewide lead of more than 6,500 votes. But Republican-controlled county elections boards, including one here in vote-rich Durham County, turned back some of the challenges on Friday.
The legal and political jockeying raised the specter of a recount, and it could ultimately climax in a political wild card: Mr. McCrory using a state law to contest the election in the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly.
“We’re supposed to have an inauguration on Jan. 7,” Theresa Kostrzewa, a Republican lobbyist, said Friday. “Are we going to have a governor? That, I think, is what most people are going to start wondering pretty soon.”
The governor’s race this year was among the most bitterly contested campaigns in the country. The state was a prime battleground in the presidential election, and it has been fractured by debates about voting, transgender rights, Medicaid and abortion. Republicans largely prevailed here on Election Day: Donald J. Trump won North Carolina by more than three percentage points, and Senator Richard Burr was re-elected by a larger margin — but Mr. McCrory struggled.
The contest’s aftermath has become a protracted spectacle. Mr. McCrory’s campaign said this week that there were “known instances of votes being cast by dead people, felons or individuals who voted more than once.” A spokesman for Mr. Cooper, Ford Porter, replied that the governor had “set a new standard for desperation.”
Such arguments helped transform what might have been perfunctory meetings of elections regulators into crucial sessions that stirred frustration on both sides. In Durham County, a Democratic stronghold, officials held a quasi-judicial gathering with sworn witnesses, an out-of-state lawyer and detailed discussions about the mechanics of elections.
“This is not a situation where politics enters into it,” William J. Brian Jr., a Republican who is the chairman of the county elections board, sternly told the crowded hearing room to widespread laughter and skepticism.
But to the delight of the McCrory critics who filled the room, the elections board unanimously spurned a challenge that the North Carolina Republican Party’s general counsel, Thomas Stark, had filed. According to preliminary results, Mr. Cooper won the county by nearly 90,000 votes, or about 59 percentage points. (Durham County will not certify its count until at least Monday.)
“There are a lot of protests out there going to specific issues that are 10, 15 more votes here and there,” Mr. Stark said. “And by the time you move statewide, that’s a lot of votes. If it’s not resolved at the counties, it will end up at the state board, and the state board will have to sort it all out.”
As other Republican-controlled county elections boards rejected challenges from Mr. McCrory’s allies on Friday, the governor’s critics complained of baseless protests that they believed were intended to discredit North Carolina’s political climate.
“They’re silly, small in number, poorly researched and often defamatory,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said of the Republican challenges. Ms. Riggs, who was monitoring proceedings in nearby Wake County, which includes Raleigh, the state capital, said some challenges brought by Mr. McCrory’s supporters had been easily rebuffed through a few minutes of internet research.
A spokesman for the McCrory campaign, Ricky Diaz, said Friday that the campaign expected people who brought the unsuccessful challenges to appeal to the State Board of Elections, which comprises three Republicans and two Democrats. County elections boards are made up of two Republicans and one Democrat.
The wrangling plays out in a state that has often been the epicenter of the national debate about voter identification requirements and other, Republican-backed changes to elections rules.
When North Carolina Democrats controlled the state government in recent decades, they sought to cement their franchise by enacting a string of laws that made it easier to register and vote, aiming in part to recruit more black voters. Combined with enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act, the effect was profound: By 2012, turnout among African-Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, soared to 68.5 percent, up from about 42 percent in 2000.
But when Republicans gained absolute control over the executive and legislative branches after the 2012 elections, they set about undoing the framework Democrats had built. After the United States Supreme Court struck down a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act, state legislators pared early voting, imposed a photo ID requirement and ended same-day registration. A federal appeals court ruled against much of that law in July, concluding it had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision.” That decision faces an uncertain future before a Supreme Court poised to have a justice nominated by Mr. Trump.
But the immediate question in North Carolina is how long Mr. McCrory will dispute the results and whether he might ultimately ask the General Assembly to consider the election.
Under state law, the legislature could order a new election or, “if it can determine which candidate received the highest number of votes,” it may declare a winner. The law asserts that the legislature’s decision in such a contest is “not reviewable” by the courts.
Mr. Diaz said talk about legislative involvement “seems to be media-driven speculation, but we’re not going to discuss possible future steps that the campaign may or may not take.”
He added, “We are extremely concerned about the voter fraud revelations that are emerging across the state and intend to ensure that every vote is counted and counted properly.”
A lawyer for Mr. Cooper, Marc E. Elias, who also played down the possibility that the General Assembly might decide the election’s outcome, said Republican challenges were “calculated at nothing other than needless delay.”
“There is nothing,” he added, “that Gov. McCrory or his legal team are going to be able to do to undo what is just basic math.”
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