A Purple State Grapples With Election Oversight

North Carolina election administrators get eleventh-hour rules on mail ballots, and the governor cries foul. Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. Hours before election officials across North Carolina began mailing midterm ballots to voters, the North Carolina State Board of Elections issued new guidance for processing those ballots, creating stricter definitions of the types of errors voters can make and still have their mail ballots accepted. Mark Sawyer is a reporter for The Dispatch based in Washington, D.C., and the inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellow through The Fund for American Studies. He previously worked as an investigator and open-source intelligence analyst focused on a range of issues including election integrity, national security, and Russia's use of disinformation and the internet to pursue its foreign policy goals. His favorite professional experiences have been serving as an election observer in Ukraine and Moldova. When Mark is not going down rabbit holes for his latest article, you can probably find him experimenting in the kitchen, birdwatching in the city, or convincing his unsuspecting friends to play a complicated board game. More We Think You’d Like