Voting is underway in North Carolina, as the 2026 midterm elections started here Friday. North Carolina is the first state in the country to begin voting, although most voters are still unlikely to cast their ballots for another month or more.

The online portal that overseas and military voters can use opened at midnight. And as the day went on, officials in all 100 counties also began mailing out ballots to people stateside who have already requested to vote by mail.

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As that was all happening, the State Board of Elections also met Friday morning to approve some last-minute changes to the rules for mail-in voting. For the most part, the new changes will require a stricter interpretation of state law, making it more likely that people’s ballots will be thrown out over technicalities that state officials previously let slide.

Republicans supported the changes, saying they’re necessary for election integrity. Democrats opposed the changes, saying they won’t stop any fraud but will cause legitimate ballots to be thrown in the trash.

This March in the 2026 midterms — when the old, more generous rules were in place — more than 6% of people who voted by mail had their ballots rejected.

However, the vast majority of North Carolina voters don’t vote by mail. The 979 people who had their mail-in ballots thrown out in the primaries this year would’ve been just a small percentage of the more than 1.5 million who successfully cast a ballot.

State officials say that as long as mail-in voters follow the rules, they’ll be fine.

But there are lots of rules to follow, and every year people mess up in ways big or small — signing their name in the wrong place, using the wrong envelope, sealing some but not all of the envelopes and other foibles. For instance, a husband and wife who accidentally mailed back their ballots in the other’s envelope, or who put both their ballots in the same envelope, would previously have been likely to have their votes counted. Now, they’re likely to have their votes thrown out.

Supporters of the stricter new rules say there will still be chances for voters to fix the problems identified. But particularly if people vote late in the process, or don’t believe the phone call they receive from the elections board is a real message, they could have their vote cancelled.

Elections Director Sam Hayes said Friday that if people plan to vote by mail, they should be careful to read all the instructions carefully, and to mail their ballot back in sooner rather than later, in case there is a problem that could force them to have to start from scratch.

“I would encourage voters, once they receive their absentee ballot, to read those instructions very, very carefully and to get that in through the mail as quickly as possible,” Hayes said.

Democrats tend to vote by mail more than Republicans, so the new rules to toss more ballots could end up favoring GOP candidates in this year’s elections.

And Democrats including Gov. Josh Stein had appeared just last week to have been successful in stopping the changes, by filing enough written comments in opposition to force the rules to at least be delayed beyond this year’s elections. But on Friday the elections board voted — in a party line decision led by the board’s Republican majority — to pass some of those rules into place anyway.

Elections officials also refused to make their proposals public until shortly before they voted to approve the changes early Friday, telling WRAL earlier in the week the proposals weren’t a public record.

“The State Board’s decision is a slap in the face to voters who stood up to these changes and a blatant circumvention of the law,” Stein wrote on social media Friday. “North Carolina voters deserve transparency in their elections, not last-minute workarounds that could keep their vote from counting. I will continue to stand up for voters’ access to the ballot box.”

Multiple nonprofit groups around the state help during elections to ensure voting goes smoothly — that people aren’t improperly blocked from voting, or face intimidation at the polls or run into other issues. One of them is Common Cause North Carolina, which said Friday it’s working on a statewide push to educate voters about the new rules for mail-in voting.

“The State Board of Elections just unilaterally chose along party lines to instruct counties to toss absentee ballots that have previously counted in North Carolina,” the group’s executive director Sailor Jones said. “This brazen action by Republican members of the state board – taken in spite of voters' objections to these rule changes and as absentee voting begins – is a violation of public trust and would result in eligible ballots being spoiled during a high-interest midterm election.”