By Michael Bitzer
Just when you think it will be a quiet Monday morning before the start of classes in forty-eight hours, the President of the United States sends out a statement that nobody was expecting, attacking a particular vote method that North Carolina voters have utilized as one of three methods to casting a ballot.
Here's the full statement by the president attacking mail-in ballots, along with many other aspects related to election administration.
If you ask anyone who studies election administration and voting processes, you will get some very pointed pieces of information to the above statement:
- While counting ballots by hand may demonstrate a sense of greater transparency to some, machine counting has been shown to have higher accuracy and efficiency in vote tabulation. See here, here, here, and here ("in one study in New Hampshire, ... poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by as much as 8%. The average error rate for machine counting was 0.5%...").
- The president wrote "At the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election." Elections aren't finalized at the end of Election Day, or even that evening. In North Carolina, the process of finalizing the results is the act of ‘canvassing,’ in which the entire process of determining that the votes have been counted and tabulated correctly, culminating in the authentication of the official election results. Ten days following the election, county boards of elections meet at 11:00 am to complete the canvass of votes cast and to authenticate the count of every ballot item. Then, three weeks following the election, the N.C. State Board of Elections meets to complete its canvassing and certify the elections. Only then is the election results official in North Carolina.
- "the States are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes." With the notable exceptions as stipulated by Congress through statutory law, election administration is conducted by the states for all elections--federal, state, and local--courtesy of the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause. This is federalism and the power to oversee elections and their administration resides primarily within the jurisdictions of the states. The subsequent sentence in the post is a clear example of seeking aggrandized presidential power over a state responsibility and authority.
Turning back to mail-in voting: as documented by my colleague and fellow blog contributor Dr. Christopher Cooper in his book The Anatomy of a Purple State, North Carolinians have almost a century of using 'absentee voting,' with the practice starting in 1917 (page 65). And it's not just the state allowing absentee voting, but also federal law: the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986, otherwise known as UOCAVA. This 1986 law mandates that certain residents in the states be allowed to vote by absentee ballot in federal elections.
As Cooper notes, the past two decades have seen a significant shift in how North Carolinians cast their ballots. It's no more the concept of "Election Day" but rather "Election Month" with the advent of in-person absentee voting used widely in North Carolina.
As noted in the following chart developed for the Commission on the Future of North Carolina Elections and based on data from the N.C. State Board of Elections, 2008's election witnessed a remarkable shift in ballots cast before Election Day, and within a decade, mid-term elections finally caught up to that shift as well (in 2018). Since then, majorities--sometimes supermajorities--of North Carolinians cast their ballots prior to Election Day.
And while the majority of those 'early ballots' come through in-person voting, mail-in voting remains a fairly constant use by NC voters. With the exception of the COVID election of 2020, the percentage of North Carolina ballots being submitted by mail has typically ranged from two to five percent since 2008. The two most recent elections of 2022's mid-term and 2024's presidential saw five percent of ballots cast through the mail.
Before 2018, North Carolina registered Republican voters typically dominated the mail-in voting method, with a significant majority in 2008 of 54 percent down to 40 percent plurality in 2016. In 2018 and beyond, however, a partisan shift has occurred, first to registered Democrats being the plurality of voters casting mail-in ballots between 2018 and 2022, while in 2024, a plurality of mail-in ballots came from registered unaffiliated voters, almost 4 out of 10 mail-in ballots.
A noted safety measure in using mail-in voting in North Carolina is the ballot tracking system, instituted by the State Board of Elections. As noted by the NC Election Commission's findings, "North Carolina currently uses a technology called BallotTrax, which allows any voter to track the progress of their mail-in ballot." In addition, "this transparency not only reassures voters but also allows for timely interventions in case of any discrepancies or issues during transit" (page 95).
And it's not just the actual data and processes that demonstrates North Carolinians' interest in mail-in voting, but also through public opinion surveys.
In the January 2025 Catawba-Western Carolina-YouGov poll of 1,500 North Carolinians (see the NC Election Commission report on page 197), two-thirds said they were very/somewhat confident that people were prevented from stealing or tampering with ballots cast in the state, with seven out of ten Republicans saying they were very/somewhat confident.
And when asked in January if they have confidence in their state's election safety and integrity, eight out of ten North Carolinians said they were very or somewhat confident.
Among North Carolina Republicans, that confidence was at 86 percent--the highest among the three partisan identification groups. In August 2024, when asked the same question, only 63 percent of NC Republicans had very/somewhat confidence in the safety and integrity of NC elections.
Both the August 2024 and January 2025 surveys asked North Carolinians about their confidence in mail-in voting as a "secure way to cast a ballot." In August 2024, 62 percent of NC Republicans were not too confident/not confident at all, with only a third confident. However, with Trump's win in November, that sentiment flipped: 55 percent of NC Republicans expressed confidence in the safety and integrity of mail-in voting, while 38 percent were not confident.
Diatribes aside, this is another case of the facts disputing the allegations. We'll await any formal action by the president and administration, probably through an executive order, and then what will likely be legal challenges by the states at any attempt to federalize election administration.
At least among North Carolinians, the issue of safety, security, and integrity of the state's elections find safe haven in the citizen's public opinion and in the actual administration of elections.
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Dr. Michael Bitzer holds the Leonard Chair of Political Science and directs the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College.
