On the eve of Election Day, North Carolina’s outstanding absentee vote count stood at nearly 200,000 requested ballots. Given how close races up and down the ballot are expected to be in the state, election integrity advocates there are concerned about last-minute delays that could flip results in the days after the election.
One of the biggest concerns comes from Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) voters, citizens stationed abroad like diplomats or members of the military, whose overall vote total is in the tens of thousands, but trends Democrat. The catch in North Carolina is that state law for UOCAVA voters have little-to-no security measures for this kind of absentee voter.
“The way they’re going to steal it is they’re going to drag in a bunch of UOCAVA voters, whatever Delta they need to make up,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told The Federalist. “With this number of ballots, it looks like 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.”
As of Nov. 4, there are 197,319 overall absentee ballots in North Carolina that have been requested, but not returned, according to the ticker on the Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). DeLancy says part of the problem is that there is no way of knowing how many of those outstanding absentee ballots are UOCAVA and how many are in-state North Carolinians.
