Black voters in North Carolina are disproportionately having their mail-in ballots flagged for potential rejection in the battleground state, setting off alarms about disenfranchisement.
North Carolina requires mail-in voters to get a witness for their ballots and at least 7,000 mail-in ballots have been flagged across the state because of a deficiency, according to data collected by Michael Bitzer, a professor at Catawba College who closely tracks voting data in the state. As of Wednesday, 40% of rejected ballots – 2,871 – were from Black voters, even though they comprised only 16% of the overall ballots returned. (A spokesman for the state board of elections cautioned some of the data may be outdated because local election offices have not been entering rejection data into the statewide system while legal challenges are pending.)
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The Rev Anthony Spearman, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, attributed the higher rate at which Black voters’ ballots were being flagged to the fact that African Americans traditionally have not widely voted by mail in the state, instead opting for in-person voting. Many voters are getting tripped up by the state’s requirement that mail-in voters get a witness to sign their absentee ballot, he said.
“The African American community, many of them for the first time, are utilizing absentee ballots and have not been cultivated to the practices thereof. There is a level of them being not aware of the process and how it goes and so they’re not filling out their forms correctly,” he said.
Just 3% of the Black voters whose ballots were flagged for rejection voted by mail in 2016, according to data collected by Bitzer.
“Voting by mail is very different than voting in person,” Bitzer said. “Until I’m presented otherwise I have to think lack of familiarity with the vote method process is probably what is hanging up so much of these ballots.”
The North Carolina data underscores the conundrum Democrats are facing this year as they encourage supporters to cast their votes by mail amid concerns about Covid-19. A mail vote is more likely to be rejected than an in-person one and research has shown that first-time voters and minorities are all much more likely to have their ballots rejected.
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There is an ongoing legal battle in the state over how easy it should be for voters to fix a ballot flagged for rejection. Earlier this year state officials said that if voters had any omissions with the witness portion of their ballots – the section Spearman said was confusing voters – they could sign an affidavit and have their ballot count.
But state officials quickly suspended that guidance amid objections from Republicans and ongoing litigation. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that a voter could use an affidavit to fix small discrepancies with the witness section, but said the voter would have to cast a new ballot if the witness forgot to sign altogether. Republicans are appealing against the ruling.
There also appears to have been some inconsistency in how strictly election officials needed to review a ballot to determine if it should be rejected. Earlier this month, state officials released a memo instructing local election boards that they should not automatically reject a ballot if an address for a witness was incomplete.
Guilford county, home to Greensboro, was flagging nearly one in every 10 ballots that came in for rejection before the memo. Madeline Reed, a voter in the county, told the Greensboro News and Record her ballot was flagged for rejection because officials couldn’t read the letter “C” in her witness signature. The rejection rate in the county has since fallen to 2.2%, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
“Our staff is very, very effective and they have been trained very well and they tend to scrutinize more closely the ballots they take a look at. And that may have something to do with the higher numbers in Guilford county,” said Spearman, who is also a member of the county’s board of elections.
In-person early voting began Thursday in North Carolina and Spearman said he would encourage anyone who had their ballot flagged for rejection to forget about casting a new mail-in ballot and vote in person instead. “ I think people will go ahead and do that,” he said.
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