NC Counts Overseas Ballots That Come In Well After Election Day

North Carolina counts ballots, which have the potential to swing close races, from overseas voters up to nine days after Election Day, and there is no way to effectively challenge them.

Voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) are not a small number of military and diplomatic personnel, either, and come in the tens of thousands, some of whom have never resided in the United States and do not intend to. In North Carolina, those voters can cast ballots even in local races, where the margins are typically much smaller than for federal office.

“The public does not have any method of knowing who those people are and to challenge any of those ballots,” Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT), told The Federalist. “The only ones who know that are the insiders at the state board of elections.”

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) is a Democrat-run operation that oversees voting in the state, but they have been silent on offering much clarity on exactly who is allowed to vote in their elections from overseas. The state is otherwise relatively free with voter information, such as posting raw numbers of absentee ballot requests on a daily basis during the election, but it has thus far refused to acknowledge how many of those were coming in from overseas in order to allow candidates, election integrity advocates, or North Carolinians to know how these voters impact their elections.

According to an email from the NCSBE, in 2020, the total number of UOCAVA votes cast was 33,827, broken down into 15,116 military and 18,711 otherwise overseas (a group that increasingly trends Democrat). This year, as of Tuesday, there have been a total of 31,292, with 9,959 military and 21,333 overseas voters.

While NCSBE public information director Patrick Gannon was willing to share some UOCAVA information with The Federalist earlier this year, he has since refused to respond to further inquiry on the subject.

While the divide is less evenly split between military and overseas voters this time around, their voting season is not over. Their ballots will continue to be accepted until Thursday night, the day before the state’s official canvass takes place, and votes are certified.

Womack expects that there will be thousands more ballots trickling in from overseas up until that point, particularly given Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts abroad this cycle, that could suddenly flip close races like their statewide Supreme Court race this year, where the Republican challenger leads the Democrat incumbent by only a few thousand votes.

Election integrity leaders in the state have already expressed concern to The Federalist that close races could be decided by late UOCAVA votes, which are easily manipulated because they are virtually anonymous to the public. As The Federalist has previously reported, UOCAVA voters in North Carolina are also expressly exempt from voter identification requirements, and can vote through insecure methods like email and fax.

“They’ve got a built-in bank of ballots they can dump in anytime they want to after they know the results, to customize the turnout,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, said.

In an attempt to obtain information on who the voters are, Republican state Rep. George Cleveland’s office reached out to the NCSBE for clarity, according to emails reviewed by The Federalist.

Paul Cox, the NCSBE’s general counsel, responded that the board is unauthorized to provide the information under federal law:

There is a legal complication, which is that federal law does not permit a state to reveal the identity of a military or overseas citizen voter who has requested a ballot in a pending election. See 52 USC 20302(e)(6)(B); 52 USC 20302(f)(3)(B). (This federal prohibition actually predates our state law provision that was passed a few years ago to prevent the identity of a civilian absentee ballot requester from being disclosed until Election Day or when their ballot is accepted.) Therefore, we have to determine whether there is a way to fashion a query that would not reveal such information. That would result, of course, in a more limited data set than what is requested, due to the limitations in the law. We are considering how to provide what we legally can provide, though.

Womack says that information on who the UOCAVA voters are has been available in past elections, however.

“It’s got some serious implications because no one in the state has any visibility, other than the state board of elections, over who the authorized UOCAVA voters are,” he said. “So we wouldn’t know if they come in or if they were even internally manipulated, and they’re hiding behind some some obscure federal statute they claim denies us the ability to know who the military voters are. And they’ve never hidden that before. Ever.”

Beyond the transparency concerns, the inability to know who is casting ballots from overseas denies North Carolinians the ability to use the legally established avenue for challenging ballots they believe to be illegitimate or fraudulent: One must know who the voter is in order to challenge the ballot cast.

Once they are approved by the official canvass on Friday, they will no longer be able to be challenged, and will therefore be counted in the official tally for all elections.

Republicans also already lost their state House supermajority, meaning they no longer have a veto-proof wall against their incoming Democrat governor, Josh Stein. Womack says his organization, which has challenged votes in the past, anticipated trying to push through UOCAVA reform packages in the upcoming North Carolina legislative session, but losing the veto-proof majority could be detrimental to election integrity efforts.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.