Mail-in ballots could be more easily thrown out, under new NC proposal

Local elections officials around North Carolina would have more ability to throw out people’s mail-in ballots in the 2026 midterms and in future elections, under a new rule approved by the State Board of Elections on Monday.

The tense debate over the rules Monday broke down in a party-line dispute. It came on the heels of a similar meeting last week, where the board also voted along party lines to give local elections officials more power to kick people out of polling places, and to more easily throw out ballots cast by people who lacked voter photo identification.

While state law requires voter ID, it also allows for exemptions — such as for people with religious objections to being photographed, or whose ID was stolen shortly before the election. While those exemptions can only currently be denied in a unanimous and bipartisan vote by local elections officials, the proposed new rule would instead allow them to be thrown out in strictly party-line votes — in other words, people could be stopped from voting even if some local officials believed they were legitimate voters who should be allowed to cast a ballot.

The new rules on voter ID, mail-in voting and polling place access are among a broader set of rules, also including changes to campaign finance, recounts and other pieces of elections administration, the State Board of Elections wants to tweak ahead of the November elections.

Critics say the changes, particularly those making it easier to throw out people’s ballots, will lead to legitimate voters being stopped from voting — and possibly for political motivations, if the boards decide to enforce the new rule selectively on only certain voters. The state elections board, as well as all 100 county boards, have Republican majorities. Each board has three Republican Party members and two Democratic Party members.

The new rules for mail-in voting approved by the board Monday contain a number of new technicalities that elections officials can cite in an effort to prevent someone’s ballot from being counted. Using the wrong type of envelope, or not sealing one envelope even if it's inside another sealed envelope, are among the violations that could now lead to people’s ballots being thrown out.

A spokesman for the elections board said current guidance for addressing similar issues, approved in 2021 by a then-Democratic majority, were "not issued according to law" and needed to be changed. "The rule is based on law, not feelings or second guessing to which ones or how many will actually be 'counted,'" elections board spokesman Jason Tyson said Monday.

Voters with problems on their mail-in ballots would be offered an opportunity to fix the issues in some cases if time allows, which Republicans on the board said was fair. Democrats said there will almost certainly be times when there's not enough time for people to fix their ballots, or when they simply miss a message alerting them to the problems.

The rule was approved in a 3-2 vote with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed. Republicans said the new rules are needed to protect election security. Republican President Donald Trump has made claims about mail-in ballots a key part of his unproven claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Democrats said the changes likely won’t stop fraud but will stop legitimate voters from having their ballots counted due to simple, honest mistakes.

“I think it’s confusing … and we’re going to lose perfectly sound ballots due to over-fussiness,” Democratic board member Siobhan Millen said.

Republican board member Stacy Eggers IV said people will just need to be able to follow the rules if they want their vote to count. “If they can't follow the clear instructions that are given to them, I'm not quite sure what exactly more we can do to help,” he said.

Democratic board member Jeff Carmon said he strongly disagrees that the rules are clear for what voters are or aren’t supposed to do, or for how they can attempt to try fixing those issues. For some of the rules, he said, it would take a law degree to understand what exactly they're actually saying. 

“I would love to make it where it was so simple, where people would know,” Carmon said.

The rules aren’t in place yet. They must now win approval by the state’s Rules Review Commission. That commission is made up of Republican political appointees, and during last week’s meeting Eggers said he expected the Rules Review Commission would sign off on the new changes.