ASHEVILLE – Today’s important question is about a past presidential candidate in North Carolina who really wants his name taken off the ballot.
Do you need Answer Man or Answer Woman to help you? You can send your question to Executive Editor Karen Chávez at [email protected], and it might be used in a future piece.
Question: Is North Carolina still going to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? If that’s the case, how might that change the NC vote?
Answer: First, he is said to have cut off the head of a whale that had beenhed up on the shore. Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fought to get his name taken off the ballot in North Carolina, the state’s mail-in voting time has been cut by at least a few days.
After an order from the N.C. Court of Appeals that same day, Kennedy’s name was still on North Carolina ballots in the morning of September 6. However, it’s not likely that it will stay there.
Mail-in absentee votes were set to be sent out on September 6 in the afternoon. This was after Kennedy’s request to have his name taken off of state ballots was turned down by the Wake County Superior Court on September 5.
Judge Rebecca Holt said that taking Kennedy off the ballot would not only “pressurize the state and counties to spend a lot of money to reformat and reprint ballots,” but it would also cause North Carolina to miss the deadline set by the state for handing out ballots.
In a small way, Holt gave Kennedy hope. She stopped sending out absentee votes until noon on September 6 so that Kennedy could file an appeal, which he did. Before the deadline at noon, the state Court of Appeals stepped in and said that papers with Kennedy’s name on them could not be sent out.
Done, right? Not at all!
After the decision from the N.C. Court of Appeals, Paul Cox, the general counsel for the N.C. State Board of Elections, told county election leaders in a memo not to send out ballots on September 6.
He also told them not to be destroyed. He wrote that the state board’s lawyers were looking over the Court of Appeals order and would decide what to do next. He also said that no decision had been made on whether to appeal the ruling.
The Citizen Times got a copy of the memo that Cox wrote and it says, “Bottom line: continue to hold your outgoing absentee ballots—both military and overseas citizen ballots and ballots for civilian voters.”
Later that afternoon, the State Board of Elections made its choice and took the order from the Court of Appeals all the way to the N.C. Supreme Court. The state board asked the court to make a decision quickly.
The state board said in a news release on September 6 that it would start making new ballots without Kennedy’s name on them and send copies to county boards of elections for them to look over while the appeal is heard by the state Supreme Court.
So, can you still vote for Kennedy? The truth is that his name is still on the printed papers, but you might not see it.
Impact in NC?
As of late September 5, the N.C. State Board of Elections said that county boards of elections had received 130,400 requests for absentee ballots. More than 12,300 of these requests came from military and foreign voters.
Corrine Duncan, who is in charge of elections in Buncombe County, said that almost 6,000 absentee votes would be sent out on September 6. She told the Citizen Times on September 6 that her office would keep those votes as long as the state board told them to.
The latest court decisions have pretty much cut down on the time that absentee voters have to get their ballots, but it’s not clear how long the delay will last. Holt wrote in her decision that taking Kennedy off the ballots and printing new ones would give overseas voters “at least two fewer weeks” to vote.
Duncan told the Citizen Times that it would take “at least” two days to print again the 6,000 ballots that voters in Buncombe County have already asked for. Also, she said that voters won’t have to ask for ballots again if they need to be made again.
On September 6, the state board said in a news release that N.C. Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell asked county elections directors to make sure that ballots were ready to be sent to voters who couldn’t be there in person by September 21, which is the federal deadline for sending absentee ballots in a presidential election.
The state board says that reprinting votes could take an extra 12 to 13 days. The state can ask for an extension if votes can’t be reprinted by the federal deadline.
Also, it’s not clear what effect Kennedy’s removal from the ticket will have on the North Carolina presidential race between Donald Trump, who was president, and Kamala Harris, who was vice president.
Chris Cooper, a political science and public affairs professor at Western Carolina University, told the Citizen Times in an email before the appeal that he didn’t think Kennedy’s name would be on the ticket.
Cooper said, “There’s no way to know for sure how it will change the vote in North Carolina.” “The polls show that RFK Jr. was more likely to vote for Trump than for Harris, so maybe the fact that he was taken off the ballot is a small plus for Trump.”
It was also possible for Kennedy fans to vote for a different third-party candidate or not go to the polls at all, which he said would have a bigger impact further down the ballot, where RFK Jr.’s party wasn’t running a candidate, than at the top.