North Carolina kicks off mail vote

RALEIGH — Mail balloting in the presidential election began Friday as North Carolina started sending out more than 600,000 ballots to voters — responding to a massive spike in requests that has played out across the country as voters look for a safer way to cast ballots during the pandemic.

The 643,000 ballots requested in the initial wave in North Carolina were more than 16 times the number the state sent out at the same time four years ago. The requests came overwhelmingly from Democratic and independent voters, a reflection of a new partisan divide over mail voting.

The North Carolina numbers were one more bit of evidence backing up what experts have been predicting for months: Worries about the virus are likely to push tens of millions of voters to vote by mail for the first time, transforming the way the election is conducted and the vote is counted.

In 2016, just one-quarter of the electorate cast votes through the mail. This time, elections officials expect the majority of voters to do so. Wisconsin has already received nearly 100,000 more requests than it did in the 2016 election. In Florida, 3,347,960 people requested ballots during the 2016 election. The state has already received 4,270,781 requests.

While ballots go out in two weeks in other battlegrounds like Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all eyes are on North Carolina as it leads off.

Wake County, which includes the capital city of Raleigh, accounts for more than 100,000 absentee ballot requests so far. This week, the office groaned under the twin stresses of record mail voting and the pandemic.