“Wow”, state BOE Chairman A. Grant Whitney Jr., a Republican, said when the board was presented with the four plans shortly before 9 p.m., the last in a handful of counties in a meeting that began at 10 a.m. While Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one in that county, Mitt Romney still won the vote by 2% back in 2012.
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The court ordered the state to again provide seventeen days for early voting.
Democratic board member Jamie Cox said that he was willing to accept closing early on Halloween in order for the sites to open one hour earlier on the final Saturday.
The state board met for more than 10 hours Thursday approving plans in 33 counties where local boards couldn’t agree on early voting sites, times and dates over a 17-day period starting in late October.
North Carolina election officials are scrutinizing proposed early voting schedules in a third of the state’s counties that were altered when a federal appeals court struck down ballot access laws written by Republicans. State board members, reviewing the voting patterns of Robeson County residents, chose to shift some of those hours to the end of the early voting period, when more people tend to vote.
The county surrounding Charlotte, North Carolina, will have more early voting options after state election officials decided a schedule approved by local Republicans was inadequate for this fall’s election.
The Orange County Board of Commissioners had asked the local board to expand hours as much as possible, promising to fund the additional cost.
Early voting for the 2016 USA presidential election kicked off on Friday in North Carolina, ushering in a two-month period of advance voting before the final results will be tallied on Election Day on November 8. The court had emphasized how scaling back early voting days meant removing the opportunity for some Sunday voting popular with black residents and predominantly black churches through “souls to the polls” efforts.
North Carolina residents are the first Americans to cast their ballots in early voting Friday.
“We have to have a justification or we’re going to have a real problem”, said state board member James Baker, a Republican, before a 3-2 vote in favor of restoring 38 cumulative hours of Sunday voting at several sites in Cumberland County, home to Fort Bragg. Republican board member Bob Randall, who rejected the compromise, submitted his own plan for 530 hours of early voting.
But some Democrats anxious it wasn’t enough to handle the massive amounts of early voters in a state that also has a closely fought governor’s race and other statewide elections this November. Any early voting adjustment could tweak turnout.
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Historically, Republicans have been favored by absentee voting in North Carolina, one of the states without a fixed voting pattern – the population does not traditionally favor one majority party over the other – so that in every presidential election the candidates go all out to win here. For the protection of AP and its licensors, content may not be copied, altered or redistributed in any form. Doing so may result in civil and/or criminal penalties.
