North Carolina Will Send Out Absentee Ballots Without RFK Jr.’s Name By Next Week
The North Carolina State Board of Elections announced Friday that they will send out absentee ballots without Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name by next week, despite a tight turnaround time.
The state had to reprint millions of ballots after the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in Kennedy’s favor last Tuesday, ordering that the election board grant his request to remove his name from the ballot — after he suspended his campaign on Aug. 23.
With over 10 voting and election lawsuits filed this cycle, North Carolina is one of the most litigious states.
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The federal deadline for sending absentee ballots to military and overseas voters is this Saturday and the election board previously expressed concerns that they would have to get a waiver for that deadline if they had to change all their ballots.
However, the State Election Board found a solution: send absentee ballots to military and overseas voters by Saturday and then send out the rest of the ballots to voters next Tuesday.
The board said this schedule makes sense because 90% of military and overseas voters cast their ballots electronically — their ballots are delivered to them through an online portal and returned the same way.
The state board said staff worked over the weekend and will continue this week to get the online portal ready for these voters. Also, the state can focus on printing just enough ballots by this weekend, so the small group of voters who do request their ballots via mail can get them on time.
Then, they’ll have a few additional days to finish printing the rest of the ballots. As of Thursday, more than 166,000 voters — including more than 13,600 military and overseas voters — have requested ballots in North Carolina. Voters have until Oct. 29 to request absentee ballots.
“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 Friday. “Because of them, we expect to meet the federal deadline for ballot delivery, and North Carolinians can finally start voting in this important election.”
In their statement Friday, the board said getting this done is no easy feat. State and county officials and vendors have worked hard to code, design, proof, and print new ballots at an extremely fast pace while having to discard the millions of ballots they already produced. Also, the State Election Board has ordered special on-demand ballot printers to be placed throughout the state in case vendors can’t get ballots back in time.
There are significant costs associated with this. The board said cost 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.”
Read the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ statement here.
Previous update, Sept. 10
North Carolina’s highest court affirmed a lower court ruling ordering the state Board of Elections to reprint new ballots without Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name on them after the former third-party candidate withdrew from the race.
The state Supreme Court on Monday upheld the Sept. 6 ruling from the state Court of Appeals, which said the state could not distribute ballots with him listed as a candidate and must print new ballots.
The election board had appealed the lower court decision, saying in a statement that before the order, almost 3 million ballots with Kennedy’s name had already been printed. They asked the North Carolina Supreme Court for an expedited decision, “so counties will not have to spend additional money preparing and printing new ballots if the State Board is successful in its appeal.”
On Monday, the high court acknowledged “that expediting the process of printing new ballots will require considerable time and effort by our election officials and significant expense to the State.”
But, the court said, “that is a price the North Carolina Constitution expects us to incur to protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.”
In her dissent, liberal Justice Allison Riggs wrote that “a currently anonymous panel of three intermediate state appellate judges have taken into their hands the power to significantly shorten the absentee voting period and to throw into disarray preparations for a presidential election in this state.”
The appeals court, Riggs writes, overstepped its powers.
“Elections—the cornerstone of our democracy—are not games or exercises in ego-stroking. With a disturbing disregard for the impact on millions of North Carolina voters, plaintiff Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., (Mr. Kennedy) seeks to have his cake and eat it, too.”
Previous update, Sept. 9
The North Carolina State Board of Elections appealed a state court’s decision ordering them to reprint new ballots without Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name on them, even though that would further delay the start of absentee voting.
The election board, which filed the appeal on Friday evening, said in a statement that they asked the North Carolina Supreme Court for an expedited decision, “so counties will not have to spend additional money preparing and printing new ballots if the State Board is successful in its appeal.”
This all started when Kennedy, running as a third-party candidate, suspended his 2024 presidential campaign on Aug. 23 and endorsed former President Donald Trump (R), who faces Vice President Kamala Harris (D).
He asked numerous battleground states to remove his name from the ballot since he didn’t want to pull votes away from Trump in those places.
North Carolina begins sending out absentee ballots 60 days before the election — which would’ve been Friday, so the board said removing his name from the ballot at this point would be difficult.
Kennedy then pursued legal action and after being handed a loss by a lower court, he appealed to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which ruled in his favor. The court said the state could not distribute ballots with him listed as a candidate and must print new ballots.
Prior to the court’s Thursday order, almost 3 million ballots — with Kennedy’s name — had already been printed, the board said in a statement.
Following the Court of Appeals’ Friday decision, the board’s staff began the process of digitally creating new ballots without Kennedy’s name in case they lose their appeal, according to the statement.
The federal deadline to send absentee ballots to voters in a presidential election is Sept. 21, but vendors have said that reprinting ballots could take another 12 to 13 days, so despite their best efforts, the state may have to request a waiver to the federal deadline.
If they sent ballots out Friday, North Carolina would’ve been the first state in the country to send out absentee ballots. Also, as of Friday afternoon, over 136,000 voters had requested absentee ballots, the board said.
Absentee voting is already delayed in the state, and if the state Supreme Court does not reverse the Court of Appeals’ decision, ballot distribution will be even further delayed. This could cause challenges for voters because they will have less time to cast their ballots.
Read the board’s statement on their appeal here.
North Carolina was supposed to mail out absentee ballots to voters on Friday, but the legal dispute about whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name should be on the ballot has delayed this process.
Kennedy was running as a third-party candidate — representing the We the People Party — in the 2024 presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and former President Donald Trump (R).
In a last-minute move, he suspended his campaign on Aug. 23, endorsing Trump and saying he would withdraw his name from the ballot in 10 key battleground states where he would be a spoiler candidate and hurt Trump’s chance for victory.
Since then, he has asked to be removed from the ballot, but many states have said they have already prepared their ballots for the November election and can’t change them now because that would interfere with voting starting on time.
Each state has different deadlines for when their absentee ballots need to be sent out to voters, and North Carolina’s is 60 days before the election — one of the earliest ones, which is why Kennedy’s ballot dispute has the largest impact on them right now.
On Aug. 29, the North Carolina State of Board Elections (NCSBE) rejected a request from Kennedy’s party to remove him from the ballot because they said it was too late to prepare and print new ballots across the state.
The vendor that prints ballots for most of the state’s counties estimated that if new ballots had to be created, most counties would not have ballots until mid-September and there would be significant expenses, the NCSBE said in a statement last week.
The next day, Kennedy asked a North Carolina court to order the NCSBE not to print or mail ballots to voters with his name on them.
On Thursday, the court denied Kennedy’s request because he “will suffer no practical, personal, or pecuniary harm should his name remain on the ballot,” but if the state had to reprint ballots, “the harm to…county boards of elections and voters would be substantial.”
However, the judge ruled that the state couldn’t mail out absentee ballots until noon the next day to give Kennedy time to appeal, even though they planned to mail them out in the morning.
Kennedy appealed the decision to the North Carolina Court of Appeals that day. On Friday morning, the court reversed the lower court’s denial, ruling the state was prohibited from distributing ballots listing Kennedy as a candidate.
Shortly after this court order was issued, NCSBE’s general counsel Paul Cox sent an email to the state’s 100 county election directors, telling them to hold their outgoing absentee ballots.
“Obviously, this will be a major undertaking for everyone. Our attorneys are reviewing the order and determining how to move forward. No decision has been made on whether this ruling will be appealed,” Cox wrote in the Friday morning email.
Regardless of whether the board decides to appeal, absentee voting has already been delayed.
North Carolina is not the only state Kennedy has notched a court victory in. In Michigan, the state’s Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Kennedy must be removed from the ballot, reversing a decision made earlier this week by a lower court judge.
Michigan’s absentee ballots don’t need to be sent out until 45 days before the election, but this will likely still impact their timeline. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D)’s office will appeal this decision, according to her spokesperson.
Read the North Carolina Court of Appeals order here.
Read the NCSBE general counsel’s email to election officials here.