North Carolina begins mailing absentee ballots today, the first state in the nation to do so. Depending on how long the Post Office takes to deliver them, people in the state can begin registering their votes in just days. By law this year, Boards of Elections must begin processing absentees by September 29. There are no drop boxes, but voters (or a near relative or verifiable legal guardian) may drop off their ballots — properly sealed, signed and witnessed — at their county Board of Elections office. Voters may still mail in their ballots, but given this summer’s reporting about mail delivery slowdowns, they had best not delay.
My county uses optically scanned paper ballots. As soon as elections officials adjudge the bar-coded envelopes properly signed and witnessed, staff will open them and scan in the ballots. Absentee votes here will be “in the bank” as early as a month before early voting starts and perhaps six weeks ahead of November 3.
North Carolina has a new web site where absentee voters can track whether their absentee ballots were received and approved. If there is some deficiency, voters will have a chance to “cure” those ballots and make them acceptable. Waiting until days before the election to vote by mail works against that happening.
Voting machine types vary by county. Most use hand-marked paper ballots. Only seven of 100 North Carolina counties use touch screen machines, including Mecklenburg (Charlotte), the state’s largest. I am unsure how absentee-by-mail works in those counties.
Phones will not stop ringing at our local covid-armored Democratic Party headquarters. Voters are more confused than usual this year. So many well-meaning 501(c )(3) groups are offering advice — some mailing absentee ballot request forms, others sending text messages — that voters don’t know whom to trust. That includes the acting president.
A little bit of knowledge….
When Trump suggested in Wilmington, North Carolina on Wednesday that voters vote by mail and vote again in person (you know, just to be sure), he himself was committing a crime by urging others to commit crimes.
It happens every election. A few voters send in absentee ballots, forget about it, then show up in person on Election Day to vote (they will be told they may not). Or the converse. They apply for an absentee ballot, but it does not arrive before the start of early voting, so they vote in person instead. Later, the absentee ballot arrives in the mail and they think they can vote that too.
No. You get one vote. That’s it. First, any second ballot submitted will not count. Procedures are in place to prevent that. Second, vote twice on purpose and you will be charged with a felony. (See story of my friend accused of voting twice through a clerical error.)
It sounds as if someone tried to explain to Trump how things work in North Carolina and he repeated back badly what he had just heard, as he often does. It simply causes confusion and chaos for the president of the United States to suggest people try to vote twice to test the system, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog observes.
Unlike North Carolina, most states do not process mail-in votes until Election Day. So what Trump thinks he heard will not work in most of the country. Or else the mini-mobster who thrives on chaos is trying deliberately to create more to undermine the results, overwhelm the system with crimes, and invalidate the election polls show him losing.
The executive director of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections reminded voters that voting twice is a Class 1 felony.
Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel was more blunt:
“Let me be perfectly clear: voting twice is illegal, no matter who tells you do to it. The president’s idea is a great one for people looking to go to jail,” Nessel said in a statement.
Irony is not dead, just resting
Naturally, Trump advised a national audience to commit election crimes in Wilmington, just down the road from Bladen County where the most blatant case of election fraud in decades occurred in 2018.
McCrae Dowless, a Republican campaign operative, was caught ballot harvesting (illegal in North Carolina) and falsifying, tampering with, and destroying absentee ballots. NC-9 congressional candidate Mark Harris paid Dowless to run his absentee ballot program. But Dowless was less than scrupulous about following the law and was charged with multiple election felonies, plus with collecting thousands of dollars in Social Security disability payments while being paid as a political operative.
The raw numbers of absentee requests in the area raised red flags, including with Harris’s son, an assistant U.S. attorney. Dowless was caught and charged. The state Board of Elections overturned the results and held a new election in 2019. The system worked.
Yet the irony of Trump recommending people vote twice in North Carolina two years later was not lost on Marc Elias, perhaps the top Democratic elections attorney in the country.
So, strap in for a rough ride. Elias has more election resources at Democracy Docket.
#FlattenTheVoterCurve #KeepCalmVoteEarly
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