You have a choice of how to vote in North Carolina. You can vote by regular, secret ballot on election day. Or you can vote before election day by a personally identifiable absentee ballot. More about that secrecy difference in a moment.
It is commonly thought that absentee ballots are used exclusively by people who cannot get to the polls on election day because of illness, disability, or travel. Once upon a time that was true, and absentee ballots are indeed still available for people in those circumstances. They can request the absentee ballots by mail and mark them and return them by mail.
But emphatically it is no longer true that absentee ballots are used exclusively by people who cannot get to the polls on election day. In fact, in the general election in November 2008, more than a half of all ballots cast were cast through absentee voting—2.6 million out of a total of 4.4 million votes. How can that be true?
It is because what we routinely call “early voting” in this state is, in reality, absentee voting. Old fashioned, traditional absentee ballots by mail, now a small minority of all absentee ballots, are available 60 days before most elections. Generally speaking, they must be mailed back to the county board of elections by election day. Voters who want to use such traditional absentee ballots must plan in advance in order to obtain their ballots, get them marked, and return them in time.
But early voting is different. By early voting, a voter, during a period beginning 18 days before an election and ending on the Saturday before the election, may vote at voting places throughout his or her county in a way that feels very much like regular voting but is in fact absentee voting.
Robert Joyce, UNC School of Government
* Blog posts appeared in the Coates' Canons: NC Local Government Law Blog and written by Robert Joyce.
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