The only thing North Carolina elections officials are sure about now is they won't meet the statutory start of mailing out requested absentee ballots.
This year, the start date was last Friday, Sept. 6, 60 days prior to Election Day, as mandated by state law.
More than 130,000 voters, including thousands in the military and overseas, had already requested absentee ballots for this year's general election when the process was stopped. And more than 1.7 million ballots had already been printed in time for the Sept. 6 start of the mailing process.
But an eleventh-hour lawsuit filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., halted the process so his name could be removed from North Carolina ballots, an effort he has undertaken successfully and unsuccessfully in other battleground states.
RFK Jr. first wanted on, then off NC ballots
RFK Jr. was the preferred candidate of the We the People party, which had fought to get him on North Carolina's ballot by petition, despite concerns, especially among Democrats, that Kennedy was just trying to circumvent the state's higher statutory hurdles for independent candidates seeking ballot access.
Shortly after Kennedy got his name on the North Carolina ballot following a 4-1 vote of the state elections board, Kennedy suspended his third-party presidential campaign on Aug. 23, and then endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump.
After suspending — not ending — his campaign, Kennedy formally asked the state elections board for removal by a letter submitted on Aug. 27.
But with ballots already printed and 10 days to go before the statutory start of mailing out the ballots, the elections board's Democratic majority denied RFK Jr.'s request, outvoting the board's GOP minority 3-2.
In a flurry of legal activity, a state superior court judge upheld the board's denial of Kennedy's request only to be overruled by the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
Court majority says voters need accurate information
That reversal has now been affirmed by the state's high court in a 4-3 ruling.
Writing for the majority, Justice Trey Allen, one of the court's five conservatives, cited the North Carolina Constitution's Free Elections clause. Citing case law, Allen wrote the plain language of the clause "protects voters from interference and intimidation in the voting process.”
Allen further reasoned that the state constitution guarantees voters accurate information about candidates, which would include removing Kennedy's name from ballots.
The court majority also said elections board staff had ample time, and indications from the Kennedy campaign, they should interrupt the ballot preparation process to remove his name.
Dissenting justice said court did not follow the law
In dissent, Justice Allison Riggs, joined by fellow Democratic Justice Anita Earls, called the appeals court order requiring reprinting of ballots — and the consequent delay to mailing them out — "egregious and unjustified." Moreover, Riggs wrote, the ruling was harmful to "voters of the state who have been guaranteed by their elected legislature sixty days in which to receive and cast absentee ballots and to the overworked and underpaid public servants working as election administrators in a time when such service has subjected those public servants to harassment and peril."
The high court's two Democratic justices were not alone in dissenting.
While he called his conservative colleagues' analysis of the case "thoughtful" and "entirely reasonable," Justice Richard Dietz wrote: "I believe our election laws support the State Board of Elections’ determination."
Dietz added that he believes the "Court's role is to follow the law as it is written" and that, in his view, "our election laws permitted the State Board of Elections to decline to reprint new ballots."
According to a statement, because of the order to reprint ballots, the state elections board is now preparing for the possibility North Carolina cannot meet the 45-day federal deadline for distributing military and overseas ballots to voters. This year, the deadline is Sept. 21.
Board staff says it has begun discussions with the U.S. Department of Defense to seek a potential waiver of that deadline, if needed.
North Carolina has 2,348 different ballot styles statewide for the 2024 general election. Each ballot style contains a specific combination of contests that a voter is eligible to vote on, based on their residence.
