North Carolina’s 100 counties have begun reprinting November election ballots and will send them about two weeks late to absentee voters, the outcome of a messy political impasse over whether to remove the onetime independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the ballot.
The ruling by the state Supreme Court that mandated his last-minute removal from the ballot was a victory for Mr. Kennedy, who dropped out of the presidential race last month. And it may achieve his goal of aiding the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, who was endorsed by Mr. Kennedy and could pick up much of his support.
But it will prove a major headache for county election boards, which now must reprint millions of ballots that must be tailored to 2,348 arrangements of candidates and ballot measures, depending on where voters live. That could cost upward of $1 million statewide, according to a rough estimate by the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
Mr. Kennedy’s effort to remove his name from the North Carolina electoral landscape is just one in a series of political maneuvers playing out in several states over which party gains or loses from his presence on the ballot.
In North Carolina, he is being opposed by Democrats who wanted him to remain on ballots but were seeking to remove him only a month ago, when it appeared that he might siphon a sliver of Democratic votes that otherwise would go to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I’m reminded of the old saying that politics makes strange bedfellows, and I guess it depends on what night you’re talking about,” said J. Michael Bitzer, an expert on North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C.
“One to 2 percent of a battleground state’s electorate can literally make or break who is the next president,” he added. “Here, it was 75,000 votes in 2020 that made the difference. It was 11,000 in Georgia. You’ve got very small slivers that can have huge consequences.”
Some saw unsurprising bedfellows on the State Supreme Court, which gained a Republican majority in 2023.
A lower court originally refused to strike Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, from ballots, citing the cost and hardship to election officials, but the State Court of Appeals reversed that decision.
The State Supreme Court agreed three days later in a 4-to-3 ruling that chided the State Board of Elections for failing to pause ballot printing until the dispute could be resolved. The dissenters included one Republican justice and the court’s only two Democratic justices.
So far, Mr. Kennedy’s efforts have drawn mixed results. On the same day North Carolina removed him from the ballot, the Michigan Supreme Court, which has a Democratic majority, refused to do so, saying he had sought an “extraordinary remedy” without citing a source of law to support it.
In Wisconsin, a circuit court judge in Dane County, home to the state capital, Madison, refused on Monday to remove Mr. Kennedy from that state’s ballot, saying state law explicitly barred removing qualified candidates unless they died.
In North Carolina, about 2.9 million ballots had already been printed when the Supreme Court ruling was issued on Sept. 9, according to the State Board of Elections. Counties had planned to mail ballots to absentee and overseas voters last week, as state law requires, but now will begin mailing them Friday.
In Wake County, the state’s most populous county and home to the state capital, Raleigh, the county Board of Elections estimated that the reprinting had cost about $300,000. That includes destroying about 20,000 absentee ballot packages that had already been printed; printing new ballots, envelopes and reference material; and remaking test ballots that are used to calibrate voting machines in every precinct.
“Everything was sealed and ready to go out on Sept. 6, and then we got the directive to basically shred all that and start over,” Danner McCulloh, the board’s public records coordinator, said.
The court order to reprint ballots arrived as the Wake County board was beginning to train precinct workers and prepare for a 17-day early voting period that begins on Oct. 17.
The executive director of the State Board of Elections, Karen Brinson Bell, said in a statement that the court order “imposes a tremendous hardship on our county boards, at an extremely busy time.”
She added, “But our election officials are professionals, and I have no doubt we will rise to the challenge.”
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