Mail ballots cast by Black voters in North Carolina rejected 4 times more than white voters: report

Mail ballots cast by Black voters in North Carolina rejected 4 times more than white voters: report

Published September 18, 2020 1:39PM (EDT)

Election workers sort vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
Election workers sort vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Raw Story

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Early voting has started in North Carolina, and many Black voters in the state are already seeing their mail-in ballots getting rejected at a higher rate than white voters.

FiveThirtyEight's Kaleigh Rogers reports that "Black voters' ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters" in North Carolina as of Sept. 17.

In total, Black voters have seen 642 of the 13,747 ballots cast rejected, a rejection rate of 4.7 percent. White voters, in contrast, have seen 681 out of 60,954 ballots cast rejected, which is a rejection rate of 1.1 percent.

According to Rogers, "the vast majority of these ballots were rejected because voters made a mistake or failed to fill out the witness information," although she also notes that these voters can still have these ballots counted because "North Carolina allows for a process called 'vote curing,' where voters are notified that there's a mistake and given a chance to fix their ballot."

That said, recent data from a Nevada primary showed that less than half of voters who were given that opportunity to correct mistakes on their ballots successfully did so.

Read the whole report here.

 


By Brad Reed

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Elections Elections 2020 North Carolina Politics Voting By Mail