Time was dwindling for thousands of North Carolina voters to fix absentee voting errors as elections officials hustled out an updated process for handling mail-in ballot problems two weeks before Election Day. Court battles had halted processing of ballots mailed back with deficiencies from Oct. 4 until the state issued new guidance Monday. State and federal judges had frozen key parts of the process amid lawsuits over what to do with ballots that lacked a witness signature and other information. After the new rules were announced, some counties said they had all but cleared the backlog, but voters elsewhere said they hadn’t yet been contacted.