Class action lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina seeking to block the state from disqualifying over 5,000 ballots from military and overseas voters in the 2024 general election for the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Read the LWV news article about the case — Conley v. Hirsch — here.

Background:  The Plaintiffs are voters who had all voted in accordance with state and federal election rules in place at the time of the 2024 election.  Those rules explicitly did not require them to submit a copy of their photo identification along with their absentee ballot.

After all the votes in the 2024 election were counted, the losing candidate challenged the validity of the Plaintiffs' votes - and the votes of thousands of similarly situated voters - for not submitting a copy of their photo identification along with their absentee ballots. 

More than five months after the election, the North Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the state's voter ID law did apply to overseas civilian and military voters. As a result, the state board of elections was ordered to presumptively disqualify votes cast by this category of voters in the challenged counties, whose votes will be discarded unless they can provide additional "verification" of the validity of their vote in an unprecedented 30-day "cure" process.

LWV comments:  Jennifer Rubin, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina says: “North Carolina voters followed the rules when they voted in November, and it is blatantly unfair to force them to jump through hoops to prove their eligibility months after the election because a candidate is dissatisfied with the outcome."

“There is nothing more un-American than trying to overturn the will of voters in a free election,” said Celina Stewart, chief executive officer of the League of Women Voters of the United States.