The North Carolina State Board of Elections has announced a revised schedule for sending out mail-in ballots following a legal dispute with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, which caused delays in the process.
According to the NCSBE, ballots will be sent out in two separate batches on September 20 and September 24. The original deadline for sending out ballots was September 6, as per state law, which mandates that absentee ballots must be shipped 60 days before the general election.
All 100 county boards are required to send ballots to military and overseas voters who have requested them by September 20 to meet the federal deadline of September 21. Absentee by mail ballots for other North Carolina voters will start going out on September 24, which is more than two weeks later than the state law requires.
The commencement of voting in the 2024 general election in North Carolina was postponed due to a ruling from the state Court of Appeals on a motion from Kennedy to have his name removed from the ballot. Subsequently, the state Supreme Court ordered that new ballots be reprinted without Kennedy and his We The People party on them.
Each county is responsible for covering the costs of recoding, reprocessing, and reprinting the ballots. The NCSBE reported that over 166,000 voters, including more than 13,600 military and overseas voters, have requested ballots in North Carolina as of Thursday.
Given the federal deadline, the board prioritized preparing and sending military and overseas ballots, leading to the decision to have two different dates for sending them out.
