Special to IFN
RALEIGH — All 100 county boards of elections must send absentee ballots to eligible military and overseas citizens who requested them for the 2024 general election on Friday, September 20, under a new schedule released by the N.C. State Board of Elections.
The Board also set September 24 as the date to start sending absentee ballots to other voters who have requested ballots by mail, including those who use the Visually Impaired Portal (VIP) to request and return their ballots.
This schedule ensures that North Carolina will meet the federal law requirement to distribute ballots to voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) by the 45th day before the election — September 21.
County boards were prepared to send absentee ballots out on September 6, the deadline for absentee ballots to be sent under state law. However, rulings by the N.C. Court of Appeals and N.C. Supreme Court required election officials to remove the We The People party line from the presidential contest on the ballot, including the party’s presidential nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and vice-presidential nominee, Nicole Shanahan.
In North Carolina, any registered voter can vote by absentee ballot, after submitting a request for the ballot. Voters can request their absentee ballot at votebymail.ncsbe.gov. The deadline for absentee requests is October 29. However, election officials urge voters who wish to vote by mail to request their ballot soon, so it can be completed and returned to the voter’s county board of elections by 7:30 p.m. Election Day — Nov. 5.
Through Thursday, more than 166,000 voters — including more than 13,600 military and overseas voters — have requested ballots in North Carolina.
During the past week, State Board staff, county boards of elections staff, and voting system and printing vendors have worked to code, design, proof, and print new ballots without the We The People party line. Staff have worked to devise contingency plans to ensure that ballots could be delivered as soon as practicable.
Due to the timelines for the printing, delivery, and assembly of all absentee ballots in every county, the State Board concluded that the only way to meet the federal deadline for military and overseas citizens was to establish separate dates for distributing absentee ballots.
Election officials will first focus on distributing the military and overseas citizen ballots, which is a smaller group of ballots. Currently, about 8 percent of 2024 absentee requests are from military and overseas citizen voters.
State Board staff have arranged for special on-demand ballot printers to be positioned around the state to fulfill any orders for military and overseas citizen ballots for counties whose orders from their print vendors will not arrive in time for those ballots to be prepared for mailing by next Friday. These special printers can print any ballot style approved for use in the state. There are nearly 2,350 different ballot styles statewide for this election.
Meanwhile, staff will work over the weekend and through next week to prepare the online military/overseas voter services portal for electronic delivery and return of ballots available for military and overseas citizen voters. Nearly 90 percent of military and overseas citizen voters opt for this electronic ballot delivery feature.
This plan allows time for the much larger orders of absentee ballots for all other voters to be printed and delivered to the county boards in time for counties to prepare their outgoing absentee ballot packages for mailing on September 24.
“This schedule is only possible because of the hard work of elections professionals across this state that will continue throughout the next week,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections. “Because of them, we expect to meet the federal deadline for ballot delivery, and North Carolinians can finally start voting in this important election.”
The State Board has received many questions about the statewide cost of reprinting ballots. Preliminary estimates show the costs vary widely by county, depending on how many ballots must be reprinted and other factors. Estimates range from a few thousand dollars in some smaller counties to $18,000 in Caldwell County, $55,100 in Durham County and $300,000 in Wake County, home to the most registered voters in the state.