“Sticky” Ballots Worry North Carolina Voters

Dozens of North Carolina voters say they've received absentee ballots with return envelops that are already partially sealed. WECT's Emily Featherston reports.

(NBC News) — With more than 830,000 absentee by mail ballots already sent out to North Carolina voters, it hasn’t come as much of a surprise to elections officials that there have already been a handful of issues.

That includes a couple sticky situations—literally.

Rosalie Majkowski, a Pine Valley resident, said when she and her son went to mail their ballots back to the New Hanover County Board of Elections, they found the ballot return envelopes were already partially sealed.

“We went to open the envelopes and they wouldn’t open,” she said. “So I got a knife, and my son said, ‘Stop, because if you do anything, they might think it’s fraudulent, and they won’t accept your ballot.’”

Another voter reported their return envelope was actually stuck to the ballot itself, and despite trying carefully to remove it, the envelope tore and stuck to the ballot.

New Hanover elections director Rae Hunter-Havens said they’ve had a couple dozen reports of sticking envelopes out of the roughly 3,200 ballots that have come back.

“We did receive some phone calls in the days following that a few voters were reporting that the container return envelopes, and their ballot packages may have been sealed shut, or maybe partially sealed shut,” she said.

Read more here.