On Monday, the North Carolina State Supreme Court decided 4–3 that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name should not be on the ballot for president in our state.
Because of this choice, absentee ballots will likely be delayed by a few weeks. This is because counties and election workers are already very busy at this time.
All of this happened after Kennedy stopped running for office to support Trump. He could have been a surprise if he had stayed on the ballot. But this is also one reason why some Democrats think the court’s decision was political.
“This is an attempt to sway the election in favor of Donald Trump, and the North Carolina Supreme Court, with its majority of Republicans and Trump supporters, is tipping the scales in favor of Donald Trump. It’s disgusting,” Democratic Congressman Wiley Nickel said of the ruling.
Republicans, on the other hand, say that Democrats changed their minds after RFK backed Trump.
Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, says, “Democrats were trying to meddle in the election process the whole time. At first, they sued to keep RFK off the ballot, and then, depending on the state, they wanted to keep him on the ballot because it could help or hurt Kamala Harris.”
Aside from the politics, the last-minute choice means that all 100 counties in the state have to start over, and taxpayers will have to pay for it.
“When you think about all the things that have to fit into a short amount of time, we started getting ready for that months ago.” “Then we had to switch gears and start all over again,” says Olivia McCall, who runs the Wake County Board of Elections.
Only in Wake County did they have to store 20,000 absentee votes that were already printed. Now they have to recode and print ballots for everyone. It will cost more to print and use suppliers because of the short deadline.
“We are anticipating anywhere between that 150 to 200 thousand dollars when we actually find out that percentage increase how much it’s going to reprint, and then of course we’re going to have to scale up and bring in more people,” he says.
As of right now, these information packs are being put together until some new ballots arrive next week. But time is running out quickly.
Each county prints its own absentee votes and pays for the process, but the state decides when all 100 counties can send them out. As of now, there is no new date set.
The goal is to have the reprints done by September 21 so that they don’t have to ask for an extension. This is because service members need to have their ballots sent out by that date.