Just one battleground state was set to mail out absentee ballots before the presidential debate—but that timeline has been pushed back because of litigation surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ballot status.
In North Carolina, ballots can be mailed up to 60 days before the election. It was the lone state where voting was set to begin six days before the scheduled faceoff between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.
Election officials in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will be mailing out absentee ballots in the coming days, while other swing states, such as Arizona and Georgia, mail ballots less than a month before the election.
Courts sided with Kennedy’s efforts to get his name off the ballot in North Carolina and Michigan last week. The independent candidate suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court.
North Carolina Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell asked county election officials to ensure ballots will be ready to go out to absentee voters no later than Sept. 21, which is the federal deadline to send absentee ballots in a presidential election, according to a North Carolina State Elections Board news release Friday. She told county officials not to send ballots until the case is settled and the state knows what date to send the ballots. The news release touted: “That would have made North Carolina the first state to send ballots to voters for the Nov. 5 general election.”
There are 56 days between the first presidential debate Tuesday night and the Nov. 5 election.
In 10 states, mail-in or absentee ballots are shipped out more than 45 days before the election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, which has been solidly Democratic in presidential races since 1992, sends ballots out up to 60 days prior to an election, according to the NCSL, and is now the only state mailing ballots before the debate.
Pennsylvania mails out ballots 50 days before the election. Wisconsin will send ballots out up to 47 days beforehand. So, voters there will have the chance to compare the two candidates on the stage Tuesday night.
Another swing state, Michigan, is among 11 states that mail ballots up to 45 days before the election, according to the NCSL.
Battleground states Arizona and Georgia send ballots out fewer than 30 days before the election.
“We have 17 days of early voting, and we have Election Day voting, but all with photo ID,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told The Daily Signal in an interview last week. “We think that it is a great gold standard to have a photo ID, no matter how you vote.”
He added that election results should be known sooner as well.
“We also think about pre-processing so we get the early votes and the absentee voting up no later than 8 p.m. on election night. Florida has theirs at 7:30. Ours is at 8. That’s good,” Raffensperger said. “It gives voters confidence in the process and keeps the lines short.”
“Early voting doesn’t start until the middle of October. People are requesting their absentee ballots now,” he added.
In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 43% of all votes nationally were cast by mail, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center earlier this year, while 31% voted by mail in 2022. In 2016, just 21% of votes were cast by mail. Early in-person voting and Election Day voting were about evenly split in the 2020 presidential election.
Election-security advocates have long contended that too much mail-in voting can lead to problems, such as ballot harvesting, voter intimidation, and fraud.
“Election Day needs to mean Election Day, and not an election two weeks,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an elections watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
Adams anticipates 2024 will go more smoothly than 2020.
“Courts cannot suspend election laws as easily as in 2020,” Adams said. “We don’t have a nationwide mail-in voting campaign the way we did in 2020. That’s a big deal.”
Election integrity advocates have also raised questions about how absentee and mail-in ballots have to be time-stamped and how existing laws will be enforced.
Two states split up the awarding of electoral votes by congressional districts. Both Maine and Nebraska begin mailing out ballots between 30 and 45 days before Election Day.
Now less than two months before Election Day, states are litigating about when mail ballots have to be postmarked, and whether ballots arriving after Election Day must be counted.
The most common deadline for delivery of mail ballots is by the close of Election Day, whether by-mail or hand-delivered. However, the battleground state of Nevada—with all-mail voting—is among the 17 states that will count ballots that arrive after Election Day, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
These jurisdictions still require ballots to be postmarked by Election Day. However, some jurisdictions accept an intelligent mail bar code or means other than a U.S. Postal Service postmark to date a ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
While Nevada requires a postmark on Election Day or earlier, the NCSL says, “unclear postmarks received by the third day following the election are deemed to have been postmarked on or before Election Day.”
While dark-red Mississippi is far from a battleground state, it is the subject of a federal lawsuit now in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals contesting the state law that allows ballots arriving up to five days after Election Day. The state and national Republican and Libertarian parties have sued Mississippi.
“Multiple states allow ballots to keep rolling in after the election,” said Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief in the Mississippi case.
In 2020, among the most controversial states was Pennsylvania. State law there says absentee ballots must be postmarked and received no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day. But then-Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf wanted to allow ballots to be counted as long as they arrived by Nov. 6—three days after the election, and used the COVID-19 pandemic as a rationale. Republican legislators challenged that policy in court.
The Democratic majority on the partisan, elected state Supreme Court decided in a 4-3 ruling to allow mail-in votes to be counted that arrived by Nov. 6, and declared that if postmarks or dates are missing or illegible, the ballots would be “presumed to have been mailed by Election Day” unless evidence shows otherwise.
The Wolf extension was still expected to be an emergency measure that would not affect future elections, and the deadline has returned to the close of polls. However, last week, a Pennsylvania state appeals court ruled that ballots must be counted even if a voter puts the wrong date on the return envelope.
North Carolina previously counted ballots that arrived up to three days after the election. In 2023, it passed a measure requiring mail-in ballots must be received by 7:30 p.m. on election night.
Blue-leaning Virginia, closer this year than in recent past presidential contests, has previously counted ballots that arrive up to three days after the election.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation “has blocked Virginia from accepting ballots with postmarks after the election,” Adams said, referring to a 2020 lawsuit.
Virginia entered into a consent decree in early 2021 to permanently prevent the State Board of Elections from accepting absentee ballots up to three days after Election Day if the postmarks are not clear.
Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead supports ballots being received no later than the close of polls on Election Day.
“It’s best to have results on election night,” Snead said. “The concept of extending the ballot deadline as long as you have a postmark by the deadline is a problem. Many states are doing prepaid postage, so fewer envelopes are going to have postmarks on the envelopes at all.”
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