North Carolina elections board voted along party lines to expand mail-ballot rejection grounds hours before ballots were mailed

On September 4, 2026, North Carolina's State Board of Elections voted 3-2 along party lines to approve new guidance expanding the grounds on which county election officials may reject mail-in ballots, hours before the state began mailing general-election ballots to voters -- North Carolina was the first state in the country to do so this cycle. The guidance directs county officials to "spoil" a mail-in ballot if its inner envelope is not properly sealed, if an envelope contains more than one ballot, or if a voter's signature does not match the name on the return envelope's application number; a voter whose ballot is spoiled is to be contacted and sent a new one. The guidance also limits who may deliver a mail-in ballot in person on a voter's behalf to immediate relatives or legal guardians. Republican board member Stacy "Four" Eggers characterized the guidance as a routine update to how the board and county staff process ballots, saying voters' own experience casting a ballot would not change. Democratic board member Siobhan Millen disagreed, saying the guidance "does affect the voter" because it determines "whether your ballot counts."

The board reached this outcome through a different mechanism than its first attempt. On July 20, 2026, the board had voted 3-2 along the same party lines to adopt a nearly identical rule expanding the grounds for discarding mail-in ballots over envelope irregularities, but that rule required approval from the state's Rules Review Commission before taking effect and was blocked when it did not receive it in time; the state legislature, whose approval the rule separately needed, was not in session and had no plans to return before the November midterms. Rather than the formal rulemaking process, the board's September 4 action took the form of "guidance" to counties and staff -- a category the board's own members said does not require the same review -- achieving substantially the same restriction the blocked July rule could not put into effect on its own. Democratic Gov. Josh Stein called the last-minute maneuver a "slap in the face to voters" and "a blatant circumvention of the law," and had publicly demanded transparency after the board postponed its scheduled Wednesday vote and met behind closed doors with its attorneys rather than disclose the proposed changes in advance. State Elections Director Sam Hayes said counties were prepared to proceed and that the process would be "smooth, secure, and seamless" for voters.

This is the board's third partisan action targeting ballot-rejection standards in under two months: it lowered the threshold for rejecting provisional ballots over photo ID on July 16, 2026, and adopted the now-blocked mail-ballot irregularity rule on July 20, 2026, before this September 4 guidance achieved a similar result through a process its own state-law review requirement does not appear to reach.