WILMINGTON — The New Hanover County Board of Elections on Friday shipped out 300 general-election ballots in the first wave of requests for postal absentee voting.
“I guess that we’ll have 600 in the mail by the end of the day,” county absentee voting specialist Nathan Evick said Monday morning.
The ballots couldn’t go out until both major parties’ candidates had been officially nominated. Demand for postal absentee ballots has increased as awareness has spread over the electorate, said New Hanover County Elections Director Marvin McFadyen.
Until October 30, anyone eligible to vote in North Carolina can request from his or her elections board an absentee ballot to complete and return by mail. General instructions for ballot requests are available here.
The key factor boosting the popularity of mail-in voting seems to be time, said N.C. State Board of Elections Deputy Director Johnnie McLean. The postal period begins more than three weeks before regular one-stop voting, and voters who receive the postal ballots have until November 5 to return them. That means the voter can spend a good deal of time researching the candidates on his or her ballot and feel confident about the eventual choices.
“It gives them time to think about it,” McLean said.
The Pender County Board of Elections had mailed out 110 postal ballots by Monday morning. “I imagine it’s going to pick up pretty quickly,” said Deputy Director Ann Balogh. In the 2008 presidential election, her office mailed out as many as 800 early ballots.
The Brunswick County Board of Elections by Monday morning had shipped out 320 ballots, Director Greg Bellamy said. “We did 2,500-plus in 2008,” he added, “so we’ve got a long way to go and we’re processing as fast as we can go.”
The regular one-stop early voting period, in which eligible residents may register and vote in one visit to an elections site, will begin October 18. McLean said voting activity will ramp up significantly at that point. “In 2008, there were more people who voted by absentee ballot than people who voted at the polls on Election Day,” she said.
But she doubted that postal absentee voting, despite its advantages, will eclipse the standard of visiting a polling place, casting a ballot in a booth and leaving with the sticker that says, “I voted.”
“There’s something about physically going to the polling place that people seem to enjoy,” said McLean.
