Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
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.
The NCSBE would not answer that question, or questions about concerns with the lack of election security measures associated with UOCAVA when asked by The Federalist.
But, to DeLancy, the lack of security around UOCAVA voting is exactly why not knowing what kind of numbers to expect matters: They can come in days late, unverified, and through a variety of unsecure means, potentially in the thousands, and alter results in multiple races, including the presidential contest. He said concerns about UOCAVA votes being used to tip the scales would only diminish if electoral contests are large-margin victories.
“It comes down to being too big to rig,” DeLancy said. “The problem is not just Trump, though, it’s our veto-proof majority in the legislature. They can have the governor’s office, and they’ll take it, but I was hoping we could win the attorney general’s race.”
North Carolina law stipulates that UOCAVA votes can come in and be counted as many as nine days after the election, the day prior to the official county canvass to certify results, and “may not be rejected on the basis that it has a late postmark, an unreadable postmark, or no postmark.”
In a separate inquiry, the NCSBE told The Federalist that UOCAVA voters are expressly exempt from any voter identification requirements, and are allowed to submit their ballots by absentee ballot portal, email, fax, or mail. As of Nov. 4, 7,765 uniformed military members had returned absentee ballots, while 19,247 otherwise overseas voters, the group that trends Democrat, had done the same.
In 2020, 33,827 UOCAVA voters cast ballots in North Carolina, according to numbers provided by the NCSBE. But this year, Democrats have made a major push to get out the vote overseas, and the impact of that is still unknown.
As The Federalist has reported, North Carolina also allows “never resided” individuals — those born abroad and may have never stepped foot in the state, much less the Unites States — to vote in all levels of government elections. Attempts from the Republican National Committee and others to stop those people, who have virtually no stake in American elections at any level, from voting have been thrown out of court.
That can make it easier for Democrats to shoehorn in post-Election Day UOCAVA votes to alter the results, DeLancy said.
“I’m 100% convinced their strategy is to shoot the UOCAVA loophole and they’re going to come back with an unknown number of of absentee ballots that are that are sitting out there — UOCAVA absentee ballots that had this special nine-day provision,” he said.
Aside from the lax laws surrounding UOCAVA in North Carolina, there is already strange activity surrounding those votes and others in the state.
As The Federalist reported, there are as many as 42 voters registered at one single-family home in Sanford, North Carolina, where some registrants appear to be UOCAVA and others appear to simply be active voters in the state. Neither the NCSBE nor the local election board would answer questions about voters being registered through the company operating out of that house, Traveling Mailbox, LLC, but an analysis done by The Federalist showed several persons have already voted from that address this year, including some by email.
While former President Donald Trump won North Carolina by just under 175,000 votes in 2016, his margin of victory shrunk to 75,000 in 2020.
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have been polling fairly evenly in the state throughout the election cycle, but Trump does seem to have taken a last-minute lead, according to an East Carolina University poll which shows the former president two points ahead of Harris — though that is still inside the three percent margin-of-error.
As of Sunday, after the end of early voting in North Carolina, 57% of voters had already cast ballots, according to an NCSBE press release.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.