Petition in North Dakota seeks to ban early voting in elections

BISMARCK, N.D. (Valley News Live) - North Dakota Secretary of State Michael Howe has approved the format of a petition to initiate a constitutional measure on the ballot related to election processes.

Proponents now have until Sept. 27, 2024 to collect signatures and submit them to the Office of the Secretary of State for review. The initiated measure amends Article III of the North Dakota Constitution.

This constitutional amendment prohibits: early voting, voting by mail (except for absentee ballots), ranked-choice voting, approval voting, electronic processing devices for ballot counting, voting machines, any law limiting how circulators of a petition may be paid and unsupervised public drop boxes.

It raises the state legislature’s threshold for putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot from a simple majority vote of each house to a two-thirds supermajority vote of each house.

It increases the number of days within which a referendum petition may be submitted after a legislatively-enacted measure is filed with the secretary of state from ninety days to one hundred eighty days.

It lowers the threshold to place the recall of a state, county, or legislative official on the ballot from twenty five percent of those who voted at the preceding applicable general election to just ten percent.

It requires elections to be administered by elected (as opposed to appointed) county auditors and requires ballots to be counted by hand. It allows any citizen of any state in the United States to audit a North Dakota election at any time.

It requires that individual ballots be made public on the Office of Secretary of State’s website for no less than 6 years. It also requires that anyone found in violation of sections 11 through 21 of Article III, as enacted by this measure, shall be guilty of a class A misdemeanor.

To place a constitutional initiative on the ballot, a Sponsoring Committee must submit petitions containing the valid signatures of qualified North Dakota electors equal to at least 4% of the resident population of North Dakota.

The state’s population is determined by the federal census in effect and certified at the time the petitions are submitted.