A number of voter advocacy and political organizations have begun to send mass mailings to voters and prospective voters across North Carolina as the 2021 municipal election season approaches.
The State Board welcomes efforts to engage voters and promote voter participation. The State Board recognizes, however, that many mailings come unsolicited and can be confusing to some recipients.
North Carolina election officials wish to remind voters of the following:
- The State Board of Elections and county boards of elections rarely send mass mailings.
- If you have questions or concerns about a mailing, please contact the organization responsible for it. Some mailings will include the organization’s contact information, as well as “unsubscribe” information, allowing voters to opt out of future mailings.
- The State Board encourages all voters to routinely check their registration status and details using the State Board’s Voter Search tool online.
- For information about registering to vote in North Carolina, go to the Registering section at NCSBE.gov.
- The regular voter registration deadline for the Nov. 2, 2021 municipal elections is Oct. 8, 2021. If you miss this deadline, you may register during early voting through same-day registration at an early voting site, if the municipality permits absentee-by-mail and in-person early voting. Confirm in advance with your county board of elections whether same-day registration is available.
As an example of such mailings, in the coming days, private organizations called the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI) are sending about 400,000 voter registration mailings to certain North Carolina residents that will begin to arrive around Wednesday, September 22.
The registration mailings will contain voter registration applications and information for unregistered voters. According to the groups, the mailings will go to unregistered young people who will be eligible to vote in the upcoming elections for the first time, to voters who have recently moved and have not re-registered or updated their voter registration records, and to others who are unregistered in the voting-age population.
Election officials encourage recipients with questions about the mailings to contact these groups directly. Voters may contact the groups by phone at 877-255-6750 (VPC) and 866-290-1599 (CVI).
If you want to be removed from the mailing lists, the letter will have a code near the bottom that you can email to VPC or CVI to be automatically removed ([email protected] and [email protected]).