A federal lawsuit challenges new NC requirements for absentee ballot returns

Three North Carolina nonprofit organizations and two voters are suing over new absentee ballot requirements that put votes in jeopardy of being discarded. 

The North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans, North Carolina Asian Americans Together, Down Home North Carolina, and two voters filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday against the state Board of Elections and elections boards in Guilford and Durham over the directives the state board adopted earlier this month.

The lawsuit asks the court to block the requirements for the November 2026 election and future elections. 

The state board adopted the new requirements in a 3-2 vote along party lines, with Democrats opposed, on the same day that the first absentee ballots of the 2026 general election were mailed out to voters.  

According to the new requirements, voters who don’t seal their ballots in an inner envelope inside the mailing envelope will have their ballots discarded. Those voters will be sent another ballot. 

But voters won’t have time to receive new ballots if problems are discovered on the Saturday before Election Day through Election Day, the lawsuit says. 

“The Board’s new Republican majority rushed to implement eleventh-hour absentee ballot restrictions that will inevitably disenfranchise scores of North Carolina voters,” the lawsuit says.  “They did so without meaningful public notice and over the fierce objections of dissenting members. The State Board’s new policies will require counties to invalidate absentee ballots for innocuous, technical errors unrelated to individuals’ eligibility to vote.”

At least some new NC voting rules may be delayed until after the midterms

Republicans had sued over the issue of absentee ballot return envelopes. As part of the legal settlement, the state board agreed to reconsider its policy of allowing ballots that were not sealed in the inner envelopes to count. 

The board adopted the change as a formal rule this year, which the state Rules Review Commission approved. But opponents blocked the rule from being implemented in time for the midterm election. So the board implemented it as a directive this year instead.

The lawsuit also opposes a new signature verification requirement that had previously been prohibited. 

The state board gave no clear standards or instructions to counties on how to verify signatures, the lawsuit says, and it doesn’t tell the counties what to do if they determine a signature can’t be verified. 

“This state-sanctioned free-for-all will inevitably subject ballots to varying scrutiny between and within counties—resulting in unequal treatment of voters and arbitrary disenfranchisement,” the lawsuit says. 

A spokesman for the state board said in an email it has no comment on the pending litigation. 

As of Wednesday, nearly 84,000 absentee ballots had been requested.