Two Republican strongholds in western North Carolina will be required to add extra early voting sites — a victory for Republicans, who have made an about-face on early voting amid turnout concerns in areas impacted by Hurricane Helene.
State and local election officials say the new last-minute mandate — which the state legislature passed Thursday — will put additional strain on infrastructure and election workers in counties that were hit hardest in the aftermath of the storm.
“I’m glad the legislature has such confidence in our capabilities because this is a quick pivot that we’re going to have to pull off,” Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the state board, told reporters of the changes, at times appearing visibly upset when explaining the difficulties that the new requirements will pose. “This is tough. It is another big ask in a time when they are already stretched thin.”
The new election law requires an early voting site for every 30,000 registered voters. Only two counties don’t currently meet those requirements: two Republican strongholds in western North Carolina. Henderson County will add three new voting sites, and McDowell County will add a second site.
The GOP is pleased with this outcome. “We made our feelings very well known,” said Matt Mercer, the state GOP spokesperson. “In light of Helene, you’d want to have more options for people, not less.”
The Republican National Committee sent a letter to the Henderson County elections board and the state board this week, threatening to sue if extra early voting sites were not added immediately. Henderson County has seen a drop in in-person early voting turnout for Republicans this year compared to 2020.
This is a new push for Republicans, who have spent years sowing doubt around early voting, baselessly claiming it is rife with fraud.
The sudden change, amid fears that having only one early site could be depressing turnout, has been hard to swallow for some. Henderson County’s Republican chair told NOTUS earlier this week that he was still torn about the value of early voting. Meanwhile, others have been outraged to discover that neighboring Buncombe County, a Democratic stronghold, has 10 sites compared to Henderson’s one.
Brinson Bell warned that the new requirements would be difficult to meet. She cautioned that finding election workers to staff the new sites would be hard, given that the pool of available trained workers is small. Locating sites accessible to voters that are secure and provide all the amenities needed for a voting site may also be challenging in a short period of time, and the board of elections may need to work with emergency management officials to set up temporary facilities like a tent if necessary, Brinson Bell said.
“(Election workers) fear that there’s going to be a point where you push so far, and tempers are so high, and there’s so much being pushed onto the work that they have to do, that they will not carry it out well. And that’s something that no one in our profession wants to do,” she said.
McDowell County previously made a decision to move from two early voting sites to one in the wake of the storm because the second site was affected by storm damage, so the election officials will now look in that area for a way to open a second site.
“We look forward to helping them any way we can to help them stand up what they need,” Mercer said.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.