President Donald Trump’s campaign, along with the Republican National Committee and others, on Oct. 25 again asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block North Carolina’s plan to extend a deadline to nine days from three for receiving and counting absentee and mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day.
Dissenting Judges J. Harvie Wilkinson and Steven Agee, who were joined in their opinion by Judge Paul Niemeyer, wrote last week: “We urge plaintiffs to take this case up to the Supreme Court immediately. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Now.”
“An emergency injunction is urgently needed to ensure that our federal election is governed by the statutes enacted by the people’s duly elected representatives, and not by the whims of an unelected state agency,” the plaintiffs wrote. “The North Carolina State Board of Elections insists that its election-eve rewrite of the state election code as part of a back-room settlement with a partisan advocacy group is only a ‘modest’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But that disregards the grave constitutional interests at stake.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail-in ballots carry a greater risk of voter fraud. In calling on the Supreme Court to block North Carolina’s deadline extension, the plaintiffs argue that the Board of Elections’ decision “usurps the authority delegated to the General Assembly under the United States Constitution, undermines the equal protection of voters, and is already causing the voter confusion and chaos that this court warned about” in a 2006 case.
The elections board was presumably referring to a letter circulated to numerous states by the Postal Service warning about possible incompatibilities between standard mail delivery schedules and state laws about mail-in and absentee voting.
“The deadline extension only changes two things: more votes cast by mail will be counted rather than discarded because of mail delays, and fewer voters will have to risk contracting the novel coronavirus by voting in person,” Judge James Wynn wrote in the opinion.
