The rules for voting by mail in North Carolina just got a bit clearer, and a bit easier. But plenty remains up in the air, 13 days before the voting stops, in one of the seven states on course to decide the presidency.
The state will accept ballots arriving as many as nine days late so long as they're postmarked by Election Day, a federal appeals court ruled 12-3 on Tuesday, a lopsided victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates in which all three judges President Trump named to the he 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against his interests.
But the three dissenting judges urged the Republicans to take their arguments to the Supreme Court, so the dispute may not be over. And federal and state courts are continuing to consider other lawsuits — about contested signatures on absentee ballots and whether poll watchers may observe vote-by-mail tabulation — that could also delay definitive election results for weeks beyond Election Day.
Trump carried the state's 15 electoral votes by 3 percentage points last time, a bigger margin than a handful of his other wins, but polling shows him in a statistical dead heat with former Vice President Joe Biden. GOP Sen. Thom Tillis has become an underdog in his bid for a second term, however.
After a week of early voting, 1.5 million North Carolinians have cast ballots in person and almost 700,000 have returned absentee envelopes, both records in the state for this stage in the election. But almost 1 percent of the mail ballots have been rejected or put in limbo, mainly because of questions about the signatures.
The 4th Circuit declined to stop the state from accepting delayed-in-the-mail ballots up to Nov. 12. The state Board of Elections agreed to do so last month to settle a lawsuit by voting rights advocates. At that point the GOP leaders in the General Assembly sued, arguing the decision belonged to the Legislature.
They judges bought an argument similar to the one the Supreme Court accepted this week when it allowed a deadline extensionin an even bigger purple state, Pennsylvania: The change was a fair response to the surge in voting by mail brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the recent problems with the Postal Service.
"Everyone must submit their ballot by the same date. The extension merely allows more lawfully cast ballots to be counted, in the event there are any delays precipitated by an avalanche of mail-in ballots," Judge James Wynn wrote in the opinion. The majority also noted that altering things now would violate a principle the Supreme Court has cited several times this year, which is that federal judges should not make last-minute changes in state election procedures.
The dissenters, all nominees of GOP presidents, said the extension "would cause yet further intolerable chaos" and urged the Republicans to appeal to the high court "immediately. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Now."
By the time the court gets such an appeal, Judge Amy Coney Barrett seems certain to have joined the bench. She is on course to be confirmed Monday, positioning her to prevent a potential repeat of the 4-4 deadlock in the Pennsylvania case.
Meanwhile, several thousand ballots already turned in have been in a state of suspended animation because of several lawsuits about "curing," which is when voters are told about problems with their submissions and given a shot at fixing things.
The system lurched ahead a bit this week, when the Board of Elections and Attorney General Josh Stein instructed election officials to follow a complicated process: People will be permitted to correct the ballots they've turned in if they did not sign their envelopes, did so in the wrong way or didn't submit the right information about the witness they were required to find.
But things will be tougher for people who forgot to get a witness or whose envelopes were not sealed when they arrived at election offices. They will be asked if they would like to be sent a fresh ballot for a total do-over.
The next challenge for this system is a lawsuit by the state GOP demanding permission to deploy operatives to county boards of elections so they can watch the processing of absentee ballots — and challenge envelopes they think are fishy but the county inspectors are fine with. A ruling in favor of the Republicans could tie up the tabulation statewide even beyond the new Nov. 12 deadline for ballot arrivals.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.