RALEIGH, N.C. — Republican lawmakers want to change North Carolina's mail-in voting rules so that people would no longer be allowed to wait until Election Day, or even several days before, to put their ballots in the mail.
A bill advancing in the N.C. House of Representatives would prohibit elections officials from counting any mail-in ballots that get delivered after 5 p.m. on Election Day.
That would be a substantial change from current state law, which says mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Election Day but can still be counted if they arrive three days after the election, since the mail typically takes several days.
"This change will result in thousands of ballots being thrown in the trash," said Caroline Fry, who works with the voting rights group Democracy NC, during a House election-law committee meeting about the bill Wednesday.
House Bill 782 passed that committee Wednesday, with support from Republicans and opposition from Democrats. No members of the public spoke in favor of it, and Fry was the only one who spoke against it.
Republican Rep. Grey Mills sponsored the bill. He said he thinks people will be less concerned about election fraud if the state announces election results on election night or the day after.
"Hopefully on election night or as soon as possible thereafter, the majority of absentee ballots will be counted, the results posted, and voter confidence will increase because of this," he said.
The bill appears based on unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters who claimed the 2020 election was not legitimate. Trump routinely tried to frame the normal process of counting mail-in votes as illegitimate in numerous states that he lost. He also said that whichever candidate is leading in the vote count on election night must be declared the winner, even if all the votes have not been counted.
Neither is true. However, such theories have nevertheless remained popular among conservatives.
N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, traveled to Pennsylvania while officials were counting votes there to participate in a Trump campaign "Stop The Steal" event. And seven of North Carolina's nine Republican members of the U.S. House at the time signed onto a brief backing a Texas lawsuit in late 2020 that sought to invalidate the results of the election, before it was thrown out by the Supreme Court.
Rep. Jimmy Dixon, a Republican, has been in the legislature for more than a decade. And in all that time, he said Wednesday, no issue has energized his constituents as much as concerns about mail-in voting during 2020.
"I've never had an issue I've been confronted with more than mail-in ballots," Dixon said. "It was continuous. People asking and wondering because of various reports that they had heard."
Rep. Verla Insko, a Democrat, said she opposes the bill. If it passed into law, she said, people who vote by mail would probably need to get their ballot mailed 10 days before the election to be safe. But there's a lot that can change in the last 10 days of an election, she said.
"In those 10 days I could learn something about a candidate that made me change my mind," she said. "So this bothers me a little bit, that we're treating mail-in ballot voters differently from people who go to the polls."
Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat, said she doesn't see anything wrong with the current law of allowing people to get their ballots in the mail by Election Day, then giving a few more days for the mail to get those ballots delivered to be counted.
"The Postal Service has gotten pretty unreliable," she said. "And I feel like folks ought to have their ballot counted, if they cast it by Election Day."
Rep. Destin Hall, a Republican, said most other states already have a rule like this on the books.
"We're not plowing any new ground here," he said. "And the benefit is we don't have this media frenzy where ballots are being counted after Election Day and people are seeing that on TV and wondering if hijinks are going on," he said.
In 2020, North Carolina was among the states where the unofficial results of the presidential race weren't announced until after election night, since mail-in ballots had extra time to be delivered and the race was so close — in the end, Trump defeated Joe Biden here by 1.3% of the vote.
But even with North Carolina voters shattering previous records for the number and percentage of ballots cast by mail last year, nearly every result was known on election night. The presidential race was one of the exceptions, along with the race for U.S. Senate and a few others.
State officials said last year just before the election that they expected to have about 97% of the votes counted by Election Night, even with the large number of people voting by mail because of COVID-19, The News & Observer reported.
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