NC elections board, now under GOP control, just dealt a blow to early voting | Opinion
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With the State Board of Elections now firmly under their control, North Carolina Republicans have set their sights on a longtime target: early voting.
The state board met Tuesday to settle plans for 12 counties whose election boards couldn’t reach a unanimous decision on early voting for March’s primary election. The bulk of those disputes were related to Sunday voting and campus polling places, which Republicans have long sought to eliminate or reduce.
In Jackson County, the dispute primarily revolved around an early voting site at Western Carolina University that had been in use for nearly a decade. According to an analysis from WCU political science professor Chris Cooper, that site has increased youth early voting turnout, and has had the highest proportion of same day voter registrations of any polling site in the state in eight of the past nine elections.
On Tuesday, the state board voted in favor of a plan that would eliminate the WCU site. It will have virtually no impact on costs or personnel, because those resources will simply be diverted to the next closest polling site, which will now have to serve more voters. A major argument for relocating the WCU location was the supposed availability of parking, but board members also eschewed an early voting site on Elon University’s campus that was much larger and had more abundant parking than its proposed alternative.
In Guilford County, Democrats pushed to include early voting sites at North Carolina A&T and UNC Greensboro, which are regularly used in presidential election years but not typically for midterm elections. When the plan was being debated last year, Guilford County Board of Elections Chairman Eugene Lester, a Republican, made the dubious claim that voting is a privilege, not a right, and said it “may require some work on the citizens’ parts.” The state board opted Tuesday to proceed with the Republican plan, which did not include any on-campus sites, and the board’s chair mocked students who were present at the meeting for wanting a voting site of their own.
Meanwhile, in counties like Craven and Harnett, county boards disagreed on whether to allow Sunday voting. In some cases, the boards insisted that the reduction in early voting was a result of logistical factors, such as staffing, cost or low turnout. When pressed, however, some admitted there was no reason it would be inconvenient or impossible to allow Sunday voting, and conceded that they did have the budget for it. Despite this, the state board decided to eliminate Sunday voting anyway, with some board members citing religious considerations as a factor.
Even in some of the plans unanimously approved by county election boards, access to early voting was reduced. An analysis from Common Cause NC found that 24 counties reduced either the number of locations or hours that were offered four years ago in the last midterm election. That will inevitably have an impact, as changing early voting sites tends to create confusion and reduce voter turnout. Add in the counties whose plans were decided on Tuesday, and the result is that roughly a third of North Carolina’s 100 counties will have reduced access to early voting in March’s primary. That’s troubling, and it could set a precedent for making those changes on a larger, statewide scale in future elections.
Many of the board’s Republican members pointed out that North Carolina already offers a lot of opportunities for early voting, so for the most part, early voting may not need to be expanded. That’s fair, but it doesn’t mean that those opportunities need to be restricted, nor should they be. And sure, providing such a robust offering of early voting hours and locations may feel particularly inconvenient for less populous counties, where turnout doesn’t seem high enough to justify the effort. But when the government eliminates voting hours or locations, that inconvenience doesn’t disappear. It’s simply passed along to voters, who now must bear the burden of navigating the new limitations.
There should be a very high bar for making voting less accessible. If maintaining the status quo is feasible, and there are no glaring issues, there’s no compelling reason to change something that’s working just fine. For the sake of democracy, it’s better to err on the side of making voting easier than making it more difficult.
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten is covering the 2026 election for The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer.
