The US election vote count was chaotic in 2020. Will it happen again?

Hopes of an orderly election are unravelling in North Carolina, where Trump and Harris are neck and neck, even as postal voting begins.

Robert F Kennedy Jr has caused administrative complications by asking for his name to be removed from ballot papers after he endorsed Donald Trump. Picture: Rebecca Noble / Getty Images/ AFP

In a scene repeated across North Carolina’s 100 counties this week, Rachel Raper’s small team of election officials spent hours stuffing the envelopes that would have marked a milestone on the road to the White House.

However, careful preparations to become the first state in the nation to send out postal ballots and kick off voting in the 2024 US election were upended by a last-minute lawsuit, an ominous sign that this year’s contest may be marred by the same barrage of legal challenges as that of 2020.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who fought to get on to the North Carolina ballot as an independent, wants to remove his name after pulling out and endorsing Donald Trump. This had been rejected in a party-line vote by the state election board, the Democrat-appointed members who make up the majority arguing that shredding millions of ballot papers would be expensive and impractical.

But on Thursday a court put a hold on the release of ballots, ordering that RFK Jr’s name be removed. This may itself be appealed by state authorities.

For some election officials, it feels as if the chaos of 2020 may be about to start again. Kennedy is not alone in reaching for litigation. Republicans have brought two cases in the past two weeks challenging the reliability of the North Carolina voter rolls.

Raper had hoped that this election would be less tumultuous than the last, when a surge in postal voting fuelled Trump’s claims of fraud in states he narrowly lost, such as Georgia and Arizona, and local officials were dragged into a battle to defend the mechanics of American democracy.

“I saw the images in Arizona and I’m terrified that will happen here,” said Raper, 41, director of elections for Orange County, which had North Carolina’s highest proportion of postal votes in 2020.

At her office in Hillsborough, she made it clear that she had not become an election administrator to appear in the public spotlight. “I’m a bureaucrat. I’m a nerd,” she said. “We’re not glamorous people – we are just working really hard to make the election the safest, the most reliable and most robust that it can be.”

For now, the vote in North Carolina is bogged down in confusion. The state is set to be extremely close this year: a YouGov poll for The Times has put Trump one point ahead of Kamala Harris. It was Trump’s narrowest state win in 2020. It avoided any bitter post-election battles, but it did not escape violence during the campaign.

Damon Circosta was chairman of North Carolina’s state election board during the 2020 election but later resigned, partly because of the stressful experience, including threats to him and his family.

He said politicians had exploited a system with minor flaws run by hundreds of diligent but shy bureaucrats.

“We’ve toiled in obscurity for decades but over the last two election cycles, we’ve become something that the public has an interest in. We’re very good at doing the job in a way that’s secure, accessible, reviewable.”

He admitted that there was “a grain of truth” in some of the “falsehoods” spread about the election system. “It is extraordinarily hard to keep up with seven million registered voters,” he said. “So what will end up happening is somebody will move or inadvertently register and there’s invariably in that seven million going to be a couple of hundred who are not eligible to vote.

“Every election, we do our best to clean that up. We comb death records and citizenship records and voter registration records in other states, but there’s always going to be a lag and what the purveyors of these falsehoods do is take that lag and claim there are all these felons and illegals who could show up and vote. But the short answer is no, they couldn’t show up and vote.”

The laws on postal voting have been tightened by the Republican-led state legislature to require two witness signatures on the return envelope, up from one, as well as a photocopy of the voter’s identification.

Raper said there were signs of a big drop in postal voting, from 19,652 civilian ballot requests in Orange County at this stage in 2020, compared with just over 2,000 now. This was expected with the end of the pandemic, but may also be a result of the more onerous requirements and increased suspicion around the system.

The Republican National Committee, led by Michael Whatley, a former North Carolina party chairman, has shifted its focus to allegations of ineligible voters. Republicans have also accused the board of allowing 225,000 people to register without appropriate identification.

Steven Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University, is concerned that the state may become the latest battleground in a fight over “election integrity”, despite the measures taken to reassure voters and tighten up procedures.

“It’s hard not to conclude that this is preparing the soil to make claims that there was fraud should Donald Trump closely lose this state,” he said. “There’s essentially zero evidence that Democrats have made any kind of concerted efforts to have people vote illegally.”

The Times