North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sophomore Peter Smith III skipped class for this. He drove more than an hour Tuesday morning to sit in an at-capacity overflow room and watch the State Board of Elections debate early voting plans involving his campus on a television screen. About 40 of his fellow students joined him. They didn’t get what they wanted: early voting sites for the primary election on NC A&T and University of North Carolina-Greensboro’s campuses.
Neither did Democratic minorities in all but one of the 12 county election boards that were divided on early voting plans for the upcoming primary election. Over the course of five hours, the state election board’s Democrats and Republicans heard majority and minority plan arguments, thoroughly debated each other, and at one point, quoted straight from the Bible to defend their stances.
Tensions were palpable between state board members. Democrats Siobhan Millen and Jeff Carmon grew more visibly frustrated as the meeting progressed, and as their Republican colleagues denied Sunday voting and on-campus early voting sites in several counties.
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But the outcomes were predictable.
“We’re not surprised,” one NC A&T student said after the state board vote.
March’s midterm primary will be the first major election with federal and statewide contests under the new state and local Republican election board majorities, created by a legislative maneuver in late 2024 rather than by any guidance from voters. Republican lawmakers, in response to their own losses at the hands of voters, moved appointing authority for both county and state elections boards from the governor to the state auditor for the first time. No other state has election boards appointed by a state auditor.
As a result, the playing field for elections operational decisions has flipped for the first time since Republicans controlled all state and local election boards in North Carolina under former Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016.
State board nixes campus voting sites
Guilford County was not the only county whose disagreement hinged on campus voting.
In Jackson County, the local election board’s Republican majority decided that having two voting sites within 2 miles of each other was redundant. So, they removed a longstanding site on Western Carolina University’s campus that has been proven to boost youth voter turnout.
State board member Millen questioned why Jackson County would go down from 5 to 4 sites when its population is growing.
Jackson County Republican Chair Bill Thompson said the WCU campus was inconvenient because of a difficult parking situation. On the other hand, Democratic board member Betsy Swift said even though the closest voting site to campus is not far, the road to get there is a dangerous highway without sidewalks. Many freshmen and sophomores do not have cars, and the college transportation system does not go to the nearby voting site
Recent WCU graduate Taylor Bucklin teared up after the vote when talking about student voting access. While she was a student, Bucklin did substantial work, both nonpartisan and partisan, to increase voter turnout.
Bucklin said it was frustrating to watch people who don’t know Jackson County or WCU tell them what was best for them.
“It’s like that Washington Post quote: democracy dies in darkness.” she said. “Democracy dies when people don’t care and it’s not available to them.”
The state board members voted along party lines to remove the WCU site.
Sunday voting
Several hours into Tuesday’s meeting, something strange happened: a board member read aloud from the Bible.
As in most nonunanimous plans, the Wayne County Board of Elections’ disagreement revolved around whether to allow Sunday voting. The majority Republican plan would not include Sunday voting; the minority Democratic plan would.
Wayne County conducted Sunday early voting during the 2018 and 2022 midterm primary elections. In a letter to the board, Wayne election chair Robert Jackson cited issues with poll worker recruitment, taxpayer cost and the tendency for people to reserve Sundays for “prayer, worship and family” in their community as reasons to exclude it from the early voting plan.
State board member Stacy "Four" Eggers took his side.
“It's just a practical consideration, as well as a religious consideration, for both sides,” he said.
Carmon was ready. He took the opportunity to quote from a passage in the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus asked: “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? To save life, or to kill?”
In other words, voting on Sundays is in line with the Christian faith, since voting is “doing good” as part of one’s civic duty, Carmon said.
Eggers replied that, “Jesus’ vision, in his own words, was not to repeal the law, but to fulfill it.”
Millen brought the pair back to the present day.
“I don't see what's changed either religiously, practically, financially between 2018 and now that would make us have to retract our policy about voting,” she said.
The state board voted 3-2 to eliminate Sunday voting in Wayne County.
The mood remained tense as the state board turned to Harnett County’s majority and minority plans. Again, the difference was a Sunday early voting day.
Republican Chair Danny Moody said Sundays were low turnout days, and therefore, the cost per voter was too high to justify. Plus, they are operating on a four-person staff, and need a respite.
“It is a long, tiring day, and I can imagine sitting there from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 and four people show up,” Moody said. “With fatigue comes mistakes.”
Harnett County Election Director Claire Jones added that recruitment and retention of poll workers has included a fair bit of “ghosting.”
Since Sunday voting is only four hours, comparing turnout to weekday voting isn’t a fair comparison, Democratic member Betsy McCormick said. In fact, more voters per hour participated on Sundays than weekdays during the 2024 primary election, she said.
State Board Republican Robert Rucho said when early voting started when he was serving in the North Carolina General Assembly, he never anticipated it expanding to this point.
“It's been extrapolated to meeting all kinds of special interests’ needs — unfortunately, not always in the best interest of democracy and the well being of the people of our state,” he said.
Rucho doesn’t buy the idea that voters lack access; they have at least 10 days to vote early, when they used to have only Election Day, he said.
Again, the state elections board voted along party lines to exclude Sunday voting in Harnett County.
The board also voted against Sunday voting, in line with majority Republican county boards, in Brunswick, Craven and Greene counties.
Columbus County’s elections board bucked the trend; Republican chair Jillian McPherson flipped to vote with Democrats to hold early voting on one Sunday for four hours. But the plan was still nonunanimous, so the State Board got the final say. Tuesday, board Republicans backed the minority plan, which replaced a Sunday voting day with an additional Saturday.
Early voting site locations and quantities
When then-county commissioner candidate Neil Driver knocked on doors in eastern Pitt County in 2022, he heard one complaint over and over: voting was too hard. The primary early voting locations were concentrated in the heart of Greenville, while people on the outskirts felt like they weren’t considered.
Tuesday, as Pitt County’s elections board chairman, Driver took his would-be constituents’ concerns to the state. He asked to add a site to Pitt County’s historical five-site plan, and place it in the Village of Simpson’s administrative office. To pay for the additional site, Driver suggested eliminating voting on a Sunday and a Wednesday.
In a reversal of trend, Pitt County Democratic board member Etsil Mason objected to adding an early voting site, not the Sunday elimination. First of all, the site itself is a conflict of interest, she said. In March, three Republicans will vie for the party nomination in a county commissioner race — Simpson Mayor Richard Zeck, interim commissioner Gary Weaver and Ralph Whitehurst. Locating an early voting site at Simpson’s town hall “gives the mayor an unfair campaign advantage,” she said.
Second, Mason argued that the county can’t afford to add a site, considering the cost of a potential runoff in the county commissioner race if nobody wins over 50% of the vote.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we will end up with a runoff, and it will cost us extra money,” she said.
Driver dismissed Mason’s concerns as speculative. If there were a runoff, the county commissioners would help them pay for it, he said.
State Board members voted 4-1 in favor of the majority plan in Pitt County, including the additional early voting site at the Simpson town hall. Carmon was the sole no vote.
In Alamance County, county board members disagreed over where to locate a third early voting site. State Board Republicans sided with county board Republicans to place the site at a senior center with more nearby registered voters than a larger site at a college.
In Cumberland County, the State Board sided with county Republicans who favored a historically used site near a community college over a newer site serving the northern part of the county.
Only one Republican-backed plan failed to win state elections board approval. That was Madison County’s majority plan, which would have cut down the county’s early voting sites from three to one. However, it still was not a unanimous vote on the state board. Board Democrats wanted to host three early voting sites while Republicans compromised by allowing two.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.