Officials in North Carolina have seen an surge in absentee ballot requests amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
In 2016, just 5 percent of voters in the Tar Heel state voted by mail. Now, experts are predicting that over 40 percent of the votes cast this year in the state could from absentee voting. In mid-July of 2016, roughly 16,000 voters in the state requesting a mail-in ballot. In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic rages on that number has skyrocketed to 70,000.
Request for absentee ballots have increased across the board but there’s a significant increase among Democrats and unaffiliated voters.
Compared to 2016, requests for absentee ballots among registered Democratic voters have increased from 6,686 to 46,856. Among unaffiliated voters, 4,546 to 30,912 while Republicans have seen a slight increase compared to the other groups, 6,736 to 9,229.
The stats are pretty rare for the state, according to political science professor at Catawba College, Michael Bitzer.
“Typically, in a presidential year, 5 percent of the vote total is mail-in, and usually Republicans tend to dominate, and it turns into votes. It’s very much a Republican advantage while early voting is slightly more Democratic.”
The state’s legislature passed a bipartisan election reform law last month, expanding absentee voting. The law requires the state’s election board to establish an online absentee request portal for North Carolina voters and also reduced the number of witnesses who must sign a voter’s absentee ballot from two to one.
Undercutting their message
Now, North Carolina’s Republican party is urging their voters to vote by mail. According to WRAL, a party mailer addressed this month to North Carolina conservatives includes a ballot request form, and asks them to “request your absentee ballot today.”
But their message is being undercut by Donald Trump who rails against mail-in voting with each chance he gets. For example, on July 10, Trump tweeted:
That tweet was included in the email NC Republicans send to voters, but they conveniently left out the parts where he blasted the entire mail-in voting process. All that was included in the email was, “Absentee Ballots are fine because you have to go through a precise process to get your voting privilege.”
Trump won North Carolina in 2016 by 3.6 percentage points. Many states, including North Carolina, are transitioning to mail-in voting to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. With Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on the process, with unsubstantiated allegations that voting by mail allows for rampant fraud, Republican strategists are worried that Trump is making his base suspicious about mail-in voting, thereby reducing their participation in the process.
Maybe that is the case in North Carolina or Trump’s support is not as strong as it was in 2016.
Democrats drive the surge in absentee ballot requests in North Carolina.
