Special to IFN
RALEIGH – N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson on Friday challenged the president’s executive order on mail-in voting. Jackson, along with attorneys general from 20 other states and Washington, D.C., and the governor of Pennsylvania, acted to protect the votes of hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who may vote by mail, including active-duty military members and North Carolinians who go to cast their ballot in the aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Helene.
“We have over 100,000 military servicemembers in North Carolina,” Jackson said. “I am one of them. Under current law, we can request and receive absentee ballots up until the day before the election, which matters because deployments can happen fast. Under this executive order, our absentee ballots would run a very high risk of being rejected by the post office – essentially thrown in the trash – if we deploy within 60 days of the election. That is unacceptable. Whoever wrote this executive order must not understand military voting. I do, and I’ll defend the rights of our servicemembers to cast their lawful – and well-earned – ballots in our elections.”
The executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of eligible voters and provide it to states no less than 60 days before an election. It then directs the U.S. Postal Service to only accept mail-in ballots from voters on a “Mail-in and Absentee Participation List.”
The executive order violates the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives states the authority to administer elections, as well as federal and state laws.
The executive order puts our servicemembers’ votes at risk, Jackson said.
North Carolina has one of the highest populations of military servicemembers in the country. It comes as more than 1,000 Fort Bragg soldiers are being deployed to the Middle East. Because the order requires that USPS only accept ballots from a list of eligible voters finalized weeks before an election, a soldier who is deployed and requests an absentee ballot close to Election Day may not have their vote count.
Mail-in voting is also an important service to people displaced by natural disasters, many of which have hit North Carolina in past years. When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, residents lost their homes and were displaced within 60 days of the 2024 election. Many of those residents were only able to reliably vote by mail in the election.
Attorney General Jackson is joined in filing the complaint by attorneys general from California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin, and the governor of Pennsylvania.