How Trump inspired North Carolina's new push to eliminate 'grace period' for mail-in ballots

When former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he claimed it was rigged by mail-in ballot fraud. Neither he nor anyone else has ever proved that claim. But many of Trump's supporters in North Carolina have been contacting their state lawmakers, demanding that the GOP-led legislature do something about it.

And now they have.

North Carolinians who vote by mail will likely have to get their ballots in the mail early in the future, as GOP lawmakers are close to passing a new law that would trash any ballots that arrive after polls close on Election Day.

For years, North Carolina has allowed a three-day grace period for ballots to arrive and be counted as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day. That's meant to acknowledge the slow nature of the U.S. Postal Service, while allowing voters to wait until the last minute to cast their votes.

In 2009, legislators voted unanimously to create that three-day grace period. Voting rights advocates applauded the move, and other states followed North Carolina's lead. Republican lawmakers are now seeking to undo it, over the objections of Democrats.

"When polls have closed, we want some certainty that these are the ballots that are going to be counted," GOP Senate leader Phil Berger said Thursday. He voted in favor of the grace period in 2009 but now supports ending it.

The grace period will be eliminated if Senate Bill 747 becomes law. It passed the GOP-controlled state legislature on Wednesday. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is likely to veto the bill, but the legislature has successfully overridden all of Cooper's vetoes this year.

The bill would make a number of other changes to voting rules, like requiring a pilot program for new signature-matching software that Democrats say would likely force election workers to throw out many mail-in ballots that do arrive by the new deadline. It also loosens the rules for poll observers, a change conservative activists have pushed for in recent years.

“This legislation is yet another example of Republican leadership making it harder for North Carolinians to vote," top Democrats Rep. Robert Reives (D-Chatham) and Sen. Dan Blue (D-Wake) wrote in a joint statement. "It opens the door for voter intimidation at polling places, completely undermines same-day registration during early voting and makes it easier to toss out valid ballots. These changes do not improve the integrity of our elections — if anything, they erode the trust of voters.”

Trump and mail-in voting

On the night of the 2020 presidential election, Trump prematurely claimed victory even though not all votes had been counted. Many states — including North Carolina — still had several days left for mail-in ballots to arrive and potentially change the outcome of the race.

That's not what ended up happening in North Carolina, but late-arriving ballots did shift other swing states to Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate who won the election and is now president.

When it became clear Trump had lost the election, he claimed it was rigged due to fraud in those mail-in ballots. Neither he nor anyone else has ever proved that claim, and Trump's campaign lost dozens of lawsuits over it in the weeks and months after the election.

The lack of evidence hasn't dissuaded many of Trump's supporters from believing his claims. And many of them have been contacting their state lawmakers, demanding that the GOP-led legislature do something about it.

"You had a lot of folks crying foul over, 'Why can't the election be called in North Carolina? Why can't those things happen?'" said House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters Thursday.

Moore, like Berger, voted in favor of the grace period in 2009. But he said Thursday new political realities demand change.

"I think recent history has shown us that there's more paranoia — I don't know what the word is, more concern — with elections," Moore said.

Cooper noted that Trump won North Carolina in 2020, and Republican lawmakers kept their majority in the state legislature, under the same rules they're now claiming are problematic.

He said it's really just an excuse to try to pass laws that will help Republicans in future elections. Forcing potentially thousands of legitimate ballots to be thrown in the trash could have a political impact since Democratic voters, in both 2020 and 2022, voted by mail more than Republicans did.

"Using the Big Lie of election fraud, this same legislature wants to block voters they think won’t vote Republican, legitimize conspiracy theorists to intimidate election workers and anoint themselves to decide contested elections," Cooper wrote in a press release Thursday. "That’s the real fraud."