Despite pre-election concerns, most NC ballots didn’t face significant mail delays
Updated Dec. 31 with response from a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson.
North Carolina’s last-minute decision to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots attracted political controversy and led to a nationally watched lawsuit during the 2020 elections.
But the small number of votes that were counted after Election Day ultimately didn’t play much of a role in the outcome of the election.
The state’s deadline extension led to 2,626 ballots coming in as many as nine days after Election Day, of which 2,197 were counted, according to The News & Observer’s analysis of state data. For the roughly 430 ballots that didn’t get counted, about half were due to failure to meet the deadline rules — although it’s unclear how many were a result of Post Office delays versus procrastinating voters.
The 2,197 ballots represented 0.04% of the record 5.5 million North Carolina ballots cast in the 2020 election. And they made up 0.2% of the more than 1 million ballots cast and counted by mail in a year when nearly one in every five voters voted by mail.
Still, without the extension, those ballots would not have been counted due to the U.S. Postal Service taking up to nine days, and possibly more, to deliver some of them.
And those ballots could have have affected the outcomes of closely contested races that weren’t called until days after Election Day as well as one statewide race that came down to the wire. In the race for chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, Republican Paul Newby beat Democrat incumbent Cheri Beasley by only around 400 votes.
Normally, to account for lag time in the mail, North Carolina will count absentee ballots that arrive up to three days after the election, or Nov. 6, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. In 2020, the state added an additional six days, or until Nov. 12, allowing for an extra week for ballots to arrive and be counted.
But before those couple thousand voters ever cast their ballots, they inspired legal battles that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and pitted the state’s Republican-majority General Assembly against the Democratic-majority State Board of Elections and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.
N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger and Speaker of the House Tim Moore, the two top GOP lawmakers in the state, went to court to stop the extension and other election changes after Stein and the elections board unanimously agreed to them while settling a different lawsuit against the state.
Stein and the elections board won the case against the GOP lawmakers just five days before the election. The U.S. Supreme Court, despite now having a conservative majority, voted 5-3 against the Republican attempts to stop the deadline extension.
An N&O analysis of the 2,197 ballots counted shows unaffiliated voters cast about 900 ballots while Republicans and Democrats accounted for more than 600 each.
About 64% came from white voters, 12% came from Black voters and 2.6% came from Asian voters.
It’s unclear how many more may have arrived after Nov. 12. The state doesn’t require that data to be tracked.
Voters could track their mail-in ballots this year using a new program called BallotTrax. Pat Gannon, spokesman for the N.C. State Board of Elections, said there have not been many complaints six weeks after the election from those who say their ballots may have been lost in the mail.
“We are not aware of any significant issues with mail delivery times for absentee ballots,” Gannon said.
USPS mail delay worries
Gannon said the low numbers of ballots that came in during the extended period, as well as the low number of complaints about missing ballots, “seems to indicate very few issues with the mail process.”
That wasn’t a given before the election. Due to the politicization of the pandemic and public health measures, Democrats were more likely to vote by mail than Republicans — making mail-in voting a popular target for Republican President Donald Trump and other conservatives.
This summer, Trump blocked extra funding for the U.S. Postal Service to hinder its ability to handle an increase in mail-in votes due to coronavirus, according to an Aug. 13 interview on Fox Business Network. Trump told the network he blocked the extra money for the USPS specifically because “they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
The current head of the USPS is Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina millionaire who also is a major Republican donor and Trump ally. He repeatedly came under fire for actions that slowed down the mail in the second half of 2020. That included a revelation, just days before Election Day on Nov. 3, that absentee ballots faced greater delays in swing states than in the rest of the country, The Washington Post reported after looking at Postal Service data filed in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia.
For instance, the Postal Service data showed about 85% of absentee ballots in North Carolina had made it through the mail on time — fewer than the 96% of ballots delivered on time nationally.
Under DeJoy’s leadership, the USPS also ignored a court order just before the election to ensure that ballots were processed, according to multiple national news outlets including the Washington Post and Politico.
In an email, a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson disputed that, saying the agency did try to make sure ballots were delivered on time and that “we take our legal obligations very seriously.”
Political, legal battles
The deadline extension was approved as part of a legal settlement that also made it easier for voters to fix some mistakes on their absentee ballots to keep them from being thrown out.
Republican lawmakers were outraged by the settlement, with Berger calling it “a full-frontal assault on election integrity laws.” They said they wanted to have a say in the changes that came from the settlement.
The legislature already had approved some voting changes to account for the coronavirus pandemic earlier in the year, with bipartisan support. GOP leaders said the N.C. State Board of Elections shouldn’t have been allowed to approve additional changes later on, particularly after voting had already started.
The legal settlement had been unanimously approved by the state election board’s five members — three Democrats and two Republicans — on Sept. 22. By then, nearly 1 million voters had requested ballots by mail with more than 150,000 people casting their ballots, The N&O reported.
But the next day, both Republican board members resigned, facing political pressure from GOP leaders, The N&O reported.
Shortly after that, Berger and Moore began their legal battle against the settlement. Berger said it was “wrong, inappropriate and creating chaos,” The N&O reported.
They were successful in walking back a change that might have allowed some mail-in ballots to be counted without a witness signature. But they did not succeed in stopping the deadline extension, or some of the other new rules that made it easier for people to fix mistakes on their ballots, like a signature on the wrong line.
Staff writer Tyler Dukes contributed to this report.
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This story was originally published December 29, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
