NORTH CAROLINA — Just inside the doors of the Henderson County Republican Party headquarters, two men were arguing about early voting in front of life-size cutouts of Donald Trump and his wife, Melania.
Keith Coin, a Republican voter, had just learned that his conservative, densely populated North Carolina county had only one early voting site compared to the 10 sites in the neighboring Democratic stronghold of Buncombe County. He was furious.
Grosvenor Fish, who was staffing the county GOP’s strip-mall office that day, was stunned at Coin’s outrage.
“If it’s one location, they can only cheat in one place. This way, there’s no cheating. I like the way it’s set up,” Fish said.
Coin left the office shaking his head, preparing himself to sit in a long line of cars to cast an early ballot. He would do his civic duty, he told NOTUS as he walked out of the office, but he was worried that other Republicans would not.
In the weeks before Election Day, the tensions boiling over in Hendersonville, North Carolina, are reflective of messaging whiplash on the national level. For years, Donald Trump and Republicans have attacked early voting, baselessly claiming it is vulnerable to fraud. In other parts of the country, Republicans are pushing lawsuits that could ultimately restrict voter access. Those suits include efforts to purge voter rolls, keep restrictions on ballot drop box locations and more.
But in a red corner of an extremely close election in North Carolina, where residents are grappling with hurricane recovery, Republicans now want to get voters’ ballots any way they can.
On Wednesday, alarmed by data showing low turnout for Republicans in the first few days of voting, the Republican National Committee sent a letter to the county and State Board of Elections, demanding another early voting site be added in Henderson County. In the letter, the GOP repeatedly threatened a lawsuit against the county board of elections.
“The early voting patterns in Henderson County demonstrate the urgent need for at least one additional early voting location given low or no turnout in certain rural areas of Henderson County due to the impact of Hurricane Helene and the associated challenges in voter access,” Philip Thomas, the party’s North Carolina election integrity attorney, wrote in the letter.
“We will not hesitate to take appropriate legal action to ensure that every eligible voter in Henderson County has the opportunity to cast a ballot,” he added.
The party also said that it conducted an analysis of turnout through Oct. 20 and concluded that Henderson’s sole site is more accessible to registered Democrats than registered Republicans, according to the data included in the letter.
While in-person turnout numbers have set records across North Carolina as a whole, most counties severely affected by the storm are seeing voters show up at rates either similar to 2020 or below it.
In Henderson County specifically, Republican turnout rates through the first four days of early, in-person voting are hovering just below 15%, compared to just over 18% in 2020. As of the end of the day on Monday, about 1,200 fewer votes had been cast in person overall, according to analysis from Chris Cooper, the director of the public policy institute at Western Carolina University. Democrats in Henderson are turning out at about the same rates as they did in 2020.
“What appears to be longer lines is masking what is, in reality, lower in-person early voting turnout and lower turnout rates — particularly among Republicans,” Cooper said.
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Just days before the national party threatened to sue the state’s elections board for more early voting sites, Brett Callaway, the GOP chair for Henderson County, was talking through his mixed feelings about early voting.
“We prefer fewer days to vote, the more time it’s open, the more time for things to go wrong. But this is what we got to work with, so we’ll work with this style. But we don’t need three weeks,” he said, standing in front of the entrance to the early voting site at the Henderson County Board of Elections, greeting voters.
Other greeters for the county Republicans were starting to hear complaints from voters that neighboring Buncombe County had 10 early voting sites compared to Henderson’s one.
The long lines of cars outside the polling place were starting to worry them: What if people left or didn’t come out to vote because they’d heard about the traffic? One booth over, the Democratic poll greeters started to talk about the same thing, blaming Republicans for nixing the four early voting sites Henderson County opened in the 2020 elections compared to this year’s one site.
In reality, no party bears sole responsibility for just the one site: Earlier this year, the county board of elections voted unanimously (both Republicans and Democrats) to cut down the number of early voting sites to save the county tens of thousands of dollars. When offered the opportunity to add sites again after the hurricane, the board again unanimously declined to do so.
Callaway is personally torn about that decision, in favor of saving money, but is also well aware that Republican voters live in the more rural, inaccessible areas of Henderson County that are far from the polling site. He’s also recognized that the former president has changed his tune and that early voting is now “encouraged by leadership like Trump.”
“You can’t win a state election without winning Henderson County,” Callaway said. “And Trump can’t win a presidential election without North Carolina.”
At a press conference in the storm-ravaged town of Swannanoa earlier this week, about a 45-minute drive from Henderson, Trump praised early voting and expressed no qualms about election security. These were Republican areas, Trump said.
The state Republican Party blames only the Democrats, not its own Republican board members, for cutting the number of sites.
“It is unacceptable for Henderson County Democrats to refuse to expand voting access for victims of the hurricane. The Democrat board members should use their power to help victims of the hurricane, not make it more difficult for them to exercise their voting rights,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement last week.
Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the state party, reiterated Whatley’s point in a conversation with NOTUS, accusing the leadership of the State Board of Elections of making partisan choices that influenced the decision not to add extra voting sites.
Though Mercer, too, appeared to acknowledge that this position on early voting was a shift in itself for Republicans. “Wishing doesn’t change the rules, and so you play by the rules and use them to your advantage,” he said when asked about how and when the state party changed its mind on early voting.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Henderson County were fixated on the long lines of cars around Henderson’s only voting site, claiming that they were seeing record turnout and feeling optimistic about what that could mean for Trump’s presidential prospects.
None had seen data analysis like Cooper’s, nor did they believe the state’s turnout numbers when they heard them.
“I think voters are also turning out because they are concerned with voting integrity and cheating, and this is a way to ensure their votes are in,” Callaway said. “Republicans are not usually the ones that vote early in the greatest proportion, but we are now.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.