Karen Brinson Bell, Executive Director, NC State Board of Elections, address state lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this year. (Photo: Screengrab from NCGA video)
Ballots have officially been cast for the 2024 election in North Carolina.
As of Monday morning, just over 100 military and overseas ballots have been returned. And on Tuesday, tens of thousands of absentee ballots will be mailed to voters across the battleground Tar Heel state as Nov. 5 creeps ever closer.
County elections boards have received more than 207,000 absentee ballot requests as of Monday, said Karen Brinson-Bell, executive director of the North Carolina Board of Elections. That’s in addition to 19,000 military and overseas requests.
If you want to vote by mail, you still have time to request an absentee ballot — the deadline is Oct. 29.
But make sure you leave yourself enough time to receive it, fill it out and return it to your county elections board. A new state law requires that absentee ballots must be received by your county board by no later than 7:30 p.m. on Election Day.
“The U.S. Postal Service is saying to make sure you put your completed ballot in the mail at least a week before Election Day — earlier, if possible — to ensure that it will arrive on time to be counted,” Brinson-Bell said on a call with reporters Monday.
Ballots were originally set to mail out on Sept. 6, before a lawsuit and eventual state Supreme Court ruling removed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name and forced counties to reprint millions of ballots total.
After NC Board of Elections was targeted with suspicious package, director says they ‘won’t be intimidated’
Last week, a manila envelope “containing a white, powdery substance” and addressed to the NCSBE was found at a state mail center service in Raleigh. It didn’t contain hazardous materials, and Brinson-Bell said it matched similar reports addressed to other state election officials around the country. County election boards have been briefed so they can respond to any similar incidents, and the FBI is investigating.
Brinson-Bell said the board and election works will be taking precautions — whether that be wearing plastic gloves, constructing partial barriers or other measures — but are “not going to be intimidated by this.”
“What we really need people to remember is the people they’re trying to scare, the people they’re trying to intimidate … they’re trying to intimidate their former high school teacher,” she said. “They’re trying to make the work difficult for the same person that shops at the grocery store right beside them. They’re trying to make life hard so that their neighbor cannot cast their ballot.”
Will USPS see delays in mailing ballots?
Brinson-Bell was among those election directors who signed off on a letter to the head of the U.S. Postal Service earlier this month, expressing concerns that the mail system could disenfranchise some voters.
“We do see some strong customer service from the folks here in North Carolina who oversee our distribution centers and so forth,” she said. “But we do recognize that we have seen delays in our state. Many other states have seen more significant delays, and we don’t want that to be the case for our elections.”
U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy has pushed back on that criticism, arguing that some of the concerns are “generalities” and touted USPS’s “heroic efforts” to meet ballot deadlines.