NORTH CAROLINA — A court has agreed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appeal after a Republican judge decided Thursday that stalling the absentee ballot deadline statewide to reprint ballots without Kennedy’s name as a presidential candidate was not in the best interest of taxpayer money.
READ MORE: Judge denies Kennedy’s request to remove name from ballot, grants 24-hour appeal
The Court of Appeals has blocked county boards from mailing out absentee ballots, which were scheduled to be sent Friday, Sept. 6. It affects roughly 2.9 million ballots printed so far.
The order states the “stay and injunction will remain in effect until the disposition of petitioner’s appeal or until further order of this Court. This cause is remanded to the Superior Court of Wake County for entry of order directing the State Board of Elections to disseminate ballots without the name of petitioner Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appearing as a candidate for President of the United States.”
While Wake County Judge Rebecca Waters Holt did not favor Kennedy’s legal team’s request, she did agree to a 24-hour stay in the order for his attorney’s to file an appeal. The stay is now extended until further notice; absentee ballots were going to be sent at noon Friday if an appeal was not made.
According to the state board of elections, the county boards received 136,000 absentee ballot requests, including more than 12,700 requests from military and overseas voters, by Thursday.
Port City Daily reached out to the tri-county elections board directors to find out how this will affect their operations, including costs. Greg Jackson in Pender County, who has been director a year-and-a-half, said he’s in a holding pattern.
“At this time we are still waiting for direction from the state as to if there will be a new process for reprinting,” he wrote in an email to PCD.
Jackson said there is no cost estimate yet on what this would look like budget-wise for Pender County, nor could he name the number ballots in total affected.
Sara Lavere in Brunswick County also didn’t have pricing estimates yet, but said it would impact roughly 3,253 ballots the county had ready to mail.
“If we need to reprint, we would need to code ballots again, go through proofing them, testing them, and either print them in-house or send to a vendor for printing,” she wrote in an email, noting this is the first time during her tenure she has undergone this kind of measure.
It’s also a first for Rae Havens-Hunter, director of the New Hanover County Board of Elections, who told PCD that Friday’s court order will strike 3,530 ballots in the district.
“We ordered 2,300 pre-printed ballots to have backstock,” Havens-Hunter wrote in an email. “The cost to reprint ballots is $1,131.90.”
State board of elections director Karen Brinson Bell told the state board during an emergency meeting last week that reprinting the ballots would cost six figures statewide. State vendors that handle printing have indicated it would take almost two weeks to republish them.
The state board sent an email to county board officials upon receiving Friday’s news that the court paused the mail-in ballots and ordered reprinting without the We the People party and Kennedy and his running mate Nicole Shanahan’s names.
“Obviously, this will be a major undertaking for everyone,” the email indicated. “Our attorneys are reviewing the order and determining how to move forward. No decision has been made on whether this ruling will be appealed.”
By the end of Friday, the state board of elections filed the appeal and asked for the judge to expedite a decision. It’s particularly important, it noted, so county boards will not face escalated costs if the court sides with the state.
According to a release, the state board of elections staff is working through the weekend to begin coding and proofing new ballots; there are more than 2,400 different ballots to revise statewide.
Brinson Bell has instructed county boards not to mail out ballots until a date is determined and that the voting period must be consistent for all absentee voters. The federal deadline is Sept. 21 for ballots to be sent to military and overseas; the state would have to request a waiver to move this deadline if needed.
The Kennedy campaign’s journey to be recognized in North Carolina has been a multi-layered process, from beginning to end. He filed with the We the People Party instead of as an independent candidate to be added to the North Carolina ballots earlier in the spring. The state board of elections’ vote was delayed by three weeks as it investigated the party’s petitioner signatures before certifying We the People. The board eventually voted 4-1 to make way for Kennedy to be included on the ballot in the presidential category.
Then the state Democratic Party sued to keep Kennedy off the ballot, saying he skirted elections laws, but a Democratic judge disagreed and allowed his name to remain. Kennedy withdrew from the presidential race on Aug. 23 publicly and requested the state board remove his name Aug. 27, but it had to hear from the We the People party to officially remove him, as Kennedy sought ballot access in the state through party measures. The party voted Aug. 28 to remove him from NC ballots and the state board took it up at an emergency meeting on Aug. 29 but denied the request, noting impracticality of reprinting ballots already in process and the costs associated with them.
Kennedy’s lawyers told Judge Holt Thursday that the candidate followed state law and his freedom of speech was being infringed upon; the state argued Kennedy was playing games in politics. The deputy attorney general for NC cited Kennedy admitting he would keep his name on some ballots nationwide but ask to be removed from 10 battleground states, which Kennedy believed would affect the winning chances for his endorsed candidate, Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. also won an appeal in Michigan on Friday to have his name removed, after earlier in the week a judge sided with Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s determination that it was too late to remove him.
Catch up on previous PCD coverage involving RFK Jr.’s election bid in the state:
- Judge denies Kennedy’s request to remove name from ballot, grants 24-hour appeal
- After battling for ballot access, RFK Jr. removal request is denied by NC board of elections
- RFK Jr. will remain on ballot in North Carolina, judge rules
- ‘Injustice for all’: State board of election approves RFK party for ballot, denies Cornel West
- RFK Jr., Cornel West still not on NC ballot, state BOE investigates petitions to add them
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