Absentee Ballots

Are you voting absentee by-mail for the first time? Do you have questions about how to do it and want to make sure you do it right so your ballot is accepted? Follow this step-by-step guide.

The 2022 midterm election is still weeks away, but more than 22,550 North Carolina voters have already mailed or turned in absentee ballots to their local election offices.

North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has vetoed more legislation, this time a bill that would prevent the counting of mail-in absentee ballots received after Election Day. Cooper's veto on Thursday was expected, given that the measure was approved by the House and Senate on party lines favoring Republicans.

North Carolina Republicans advanced a number of proposals on Wednesday that voting rights groups fear could reduce turnout for the 2022 midterm elections. The measures reducing the time mail-in ballots may be counted, prohibiting private money from being used to fund local elections operations and compelling courts to share citizenship information with state elections officials are unlikely to become law.

A flap over North Carolina absentee ballots in the 2020 election has resurfaced at the General Assembly as Republicans gave final approval to legislation limiting Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein’s ability to enter legal settlements. The bill is now heading to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk following a party-line House vote on Wednesday.

A key subject in a North Carolina ballot fraud investigation was supposed to be sentenced on largely unrelated federal crimes, but that got delayed because he was hospitalized. An attorney for Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. told WRAL-TV he was flown from one southeastern North Carolina hospital to another on Wednesday, hours before his scheduled sentencing hearing in Raleigh.

Mail-in absentee ballots in North Carolina would have to be received by the day of the election, under a Republican-backed bill that cleared a divided Senate committee on Wednesday.

Democrats voted by mail in the 2020 election in record numbers. But what about those late-arriving mail ballots — the ones that were postmarked by Election Day but arrived up to nine days afterward in North Carolina? Who cast those ballots? WFAE's Steve Harrison takes a look at the data for some surprising revelations.

Some North Carolina Republicans are taking a different tack on legislative efforts to move up mail-in absentee balloting deadlines by also giving citizens more time to vote on the front end. But Democrats say the idea still treats voters unequally.

As Republicans nationwide have filed bills to restrict voting, the North Carolina GOP filed the “Election Integrity Act” last week, its first election-related bill.