Here’s when NC absentee ballots will go out after weekslong delay over RFK withdrawal
The North Carolina State Board of Elections announced Friday it will begin sending out absentee ballots to military and overseas voters on Sept. 20 — two weeks past the state’s deadline.
Absentee ballots will go out to other eligible voters who’ve requested them starting on Sept. 24.
The delay is due to a dispute over third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign. He sued to get off the state’s ballot after most counties had already printed ballots with his name on them.
On the day absentee ballots were set to go out, the Court of Appeals sided with Kennedy and ordered the state not to send out ballots. The state Supreme Court upheld this ruling on Monday.
This forced state and county election officials to discard the nearly 3 million ballots that had already been printed and begin scrambling to recode, design, proof and print over 2,300 different ballot styles.
The federal deadline for sending out absentee ballots to military and overseas voters is Sept. 21.
“This schedule is only possible because of the hard work of elections professionals across this state that will continue throughout the next week,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said in a press release. “Because of them, we expect to meet the federal deadline for ballot delivery, and North Carolinians can finally start voting in this important election.”
As of Friday, over 166,000 North Carolinians had requested an absentee ballot. Currently about 8% of these requests are from military and overseas voters, whose ballots will be sent out first.
The reprinting process will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and county governments — not the state — are responsible for footing the bill. Wake County estimates the cost will be around $300,000.
The deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 29. They must be completed and returned by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day, which is Nov. 5.
