North Carolina's 100 county boards began posting requested absentee-by-mail ballots on Friday 4 September. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, the state agency that runs elections and supervises those county boards, says North Carolina is the first state in the country to send general-election ballots to voters for these midterms.1
State law sets that date as a floor rather than an instruction. G.S. 163-230.1 bars any county from issuing an absentee ballot earlier than 60 days before a statewide general election in an even-numbered year, so 4 September is the earliest day the statute allowed, not a deadline the boards were racing.2 All 100 counties chose to start on it. The statutory floor became the real starting date everywhere, which is a choice by 100 separate boards rather than a requirement any of them faced.
Other states follow on their own clocks. Wisconsin clerks must send ballots to voters with active requests by 17 September. Registration then closes in Arizona on 5 October, North Carolina on 9 October, Wisconsin on 14 October and Pennsylvania on 19 October.345 Each of those dates fixes something a later ruling has to work around.
Until Friday, a court weighing whether to move a district was weighing a plan. From Friday, in at least one state, it is weighing paper already in a letterbox. the Supreme Court spent June deciding how late a mail ballot may arrive and still count; the live question now is which districts the ballots in the post describe.
