It’s time for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. When you go to vote, you might notice a poll worker write on your ballot. Well, some recent posts on social media claim that disqualifies it. For more, Paul Specht of WRAL joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: What sorts of things would a poll worker write on a ballot and why?
Paul Specht: That's a great question. There's actually a state law that requires election workers to sort ballots by precinct. During early voting, there is not an early voting site in every precinct. So in these next two weeks, when you go to vote, if you go to an early voting site that's in your county but that's out of your precinct, they may hand you a ballot and mark something on it to indicate where it needs to go for sorting. It could be a number or whatever and then hand it to you. Then after you vote and put it in the machine, they'll know which precinct to send it to once Election Day comes, and they have to sort and count all of these ballots in their respective precincts.
Terry: So to be clear, when this does occur, it’s OK?
Specht: It's totally OK. They told us, in fact, in some counties it's required.
Terry: Hasn’t this claim about writing on a ballot disqualifying it been made during past elections? Why does it keep coming back?
Specht: Right, that's something that the state Board of Elections mentioned in their statement a week or so ago that said these posts have been circulating for several years and have resurfaced recently. They're still false. What we noticed, and what listeners may notice too, is that if you see this on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or wherever, it looks like a text message between two individuals. It says something to the effect of, ‘Oh, my friend just went through poll worker training and they told me: don't let the poll workers write on your ballot because that will invalidate it.’ This text message makes it seem like this is inside information from a poll worker telling you this is a sign that they're trying to make your ballot not count. That's not true. The same text message that people have screenshotted, this supposed text message, has been around since at least 2024, from what we can tell.
Terry: So who's making these claims now?
Specht: We don't know. Oftentimes it's recirculated by accounts that are hard to identify. They don't have a first or last name. It's, you know, “IloveNorthCarolinaElections1234” telling you to look out for these trends and really sort of just trying to get people paranoid about election security when, in fact, some of these rules in North Carolina are in place to ensure election security.
Terry: How did you rate these claims?
Specht: We rated them false. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has rated them false. PolitiFact, back in 2024, looked into this claim not only in North Carolina, but in other states too, and they rated it false. One thing I'll say is that North Carolina election officials — I talked to one of them on the phone. He said a stray mark is not going to invalidate even if, let's say, you drop your pen or something like that on your ballot. It's only going to potentially affect it if it marks one of the circles that you're supposed to mark or if it goes in, say, the margins and somehow makes the ballot not go into the tabulator. It would be really hard to make a mark so heavy that it marks your circle or so deep and bold that it affects your barcode. A stray mark is highly, highly unlikely to affect your ballot's eligibility.
These fact checks are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL.
