Note: This press release was updated on Aug. 30, 2024, to include the fact that votes for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be counted and reported.
The State Board of Elections on Thursday rejected a request from the We The People Party to remove its nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the general election ballot, because it would not be practical to reprint ballots that have already been printed and meet the state law deadline to start absentee voting.
Approximately 2 million ballots statewide have already been printed with Kennedy’s name on them, and the first ballots will be sent to absentee voters in eight days.
The We the People Party, which was recognized this summer as a N.C. political party and nominated Kennedy as its presidential candidate, sent a letter to the State Board on Wednesday seeking to have Kennedy’s name taken off of N.C. ballots. Read letter (PDF).
The State Board scheduled an emergency meeting for Thursday to consider the request. A majority of the Board determined it was too late in the process to change course and prepare and print new ballots across the state.
Estimates from the vendor that prints ballots for most N.C. counties were that the time it would take to prepare and print new ballots would leave most North Carolina counties without ballots until mid-September at the earliest and lead to significant additional costs.
There is no deadline in state law for when a party may withdraw its presidential nominee and have their name replaced or removed from the ballot. However, under state law, absentee ballots must go out by Sept. 6 to voters who have already requested them, including military and overseas voters who may need more time to return their ballots. And under a provision in the North Carolina Administrative Code, when a political party wishes to change its presidential nominee close to an election but before ballots go out, the State Board must determine whether it is practical to reprint ballots at that point.
As of Thursday morning, the State Board was aware that at least 1,730,000 ballots had already been printed. About 95 of the 100 counties have ballots approved for printing, and at least some ballots have been printed for more than 80 counties. Of these, nearly 70 counties will have their absentee ballots by the end of the day today, so they can prepare them for sending to voters who requested them on Sept. 6.
The preparation of ballots includes various stages.
First, once the ballot content is finalized, staff at each county board of elections and staff at the State Board work with ballot printing vendors to generate electronic proofs of the ballots. Elections staff must examine each ballot style created. A ballot style is the specific combination of contests on the ballot that correspond to a voter’s voting jurisdictions (e.g., county commissioner district, state legislative districts, congressional district, etc.). There are more than 1,000 ballot styles across the state.
Once elections staff carefully proof the contents of the ballot prepared by the printing vendors and approve the ballots for printing, the print vendors test the ballots to ensure they can be read by ballot tabulators.
Once the ballots pass this test, the vendors will print the physical ballots and ship them to each county board office. Staff at the county board then must package those ballots into outgoing absentee ballot envelopes, to be ready to be mailed to voters when the start of voting begins, which is Sept. 6, 2024, for the upcoming election. These processes take multiple weeks from start to finish. If ballots were ordered reprinted, the process would essentially start again from the beginning.
Votes for Kennedy will be counted in the general election.
Unless a law requires differently, the rule is that votes for a candidate on the ballot will be counted and reported. N.C.G.S. 163-182.15(d) says that when determining the results in a general election, the individuals having the highest number of votes for each office shall be declared elected to the office. Similarly, N.C.G.S. 163-182(1) requires that the election abstract show the votes for each candidate and ballot proposal on the official ballot in the election.
There are, however, specific situations when the law says votes are not to be counted. For instance, N.C.G.S. 163-182.1(a) provides certain principles when counting ballots, namely to ensure that a voter’s choice for a ballot item is counted. The only exceptions to not counting that vote are when the voter marks the ballot item for more choices than are allowed, referred to as an overvote, or when the voter writes in the name of a candidate who did not qualify as a write-in candidate. In either situation, the law says those votes do not count. As another example, when a candidate dies before a primary and the ballots have already been printed, N.C.G.S. 163-112(d)(2) requires that “votes cast for the deceased candidate shall not be counted for any purpose.”
There is no comparable law that directs the county boards of elections not to count a vote when a political party has withdrawn its presidential nominee’s name after it is too late to reprint the ballots. Accordingly, votes for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the general election will be tabulated and reported alongside the votes for other candidates in the presidential contest.