CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Because the state high court ruled Monday night to take Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. off the ballot, counties across North Carolina have to reprint ballots. Some counties say this will cost them a lot of money.
There were many votes on the shelves at the Iredell County Board of Elections Office on Tuesday morning, but all of them had to be pulled because they had RFK Jr.’s name on them.
Director of Elections for Iredell County Susie Jordan said, “We just didn’t think something like this would happen.”
Late Monday night, the state supreme court said that RFK Jr. and his running mate’s names should be taken off of all North Carolina ballots. This means that some counties will have to pay a lot of money to make new ballots.
“Even for our small county, that’s a lot of money,” Jordan said.
Iredell County thinks it will cost more than $22,000 to print more than 60,000 ballots again. Gaston County says it will cost about $31,000 to print almost 130,000 ballots again.
Cabarrus County says it will only cost about $5,000 to print and mail another 6,400 ballots because that’s how many they had printed before the Supreme Court’s decision.
We didn’t get a quote from Mecklenburg County on how much it would cost to print new ballots.
“We planned to spend $15,000 on a recount, so this could be up to twice as much as we planned,” Jordan said.
Jordan says the county has some printing money left over from last year’s budget, so they should be able to pay for it as long as the costs don’t go up. But in her almost 20 years working in Iredell County’s elections office, she has never seen anything like it.
He said, “As far as I know, it was never brought up that you might have to plan for reprinting ballots.”
It is thought by the state board of elections that reprinting the ballots will cost around $1 million, but this number could change a lot based on how many ballots have already been printed, how many need to be recoded and reprinted, and which vendors are used.
No new date has been set for when counties will send out absentee ballots. Everything was set to go on September 6, but at the last minute, a judge stopped things because RFK Jr.’s case to have his name taken off was still in court.