Martin County Supervisor of Elections Vicki Davis has announced early voting will be available to all registered county voters from 8 a.m.to 5 p.m. August 20 to 27, including Sunday, at the Martin County Elections Center, 135 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. The state board will set the final early voting schedule for the November 8 election.
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While 52 percent of those 18-25 years old used early in-person voting to cast their ballots, it was those voters over the age of 66 that saw the greatest percentage of voters using early in-person voting, with 61 percent casting their ballots before Election Day.
The local board met in response to a USA 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that the state’s 2013 voter ID law had “discriminatory intent” and targeted “African-Americans with nearly surgical precision”.
North Carolina’s voter ID law is still tied up in federal courts.
The Republican-adopted plan calls for 2,504 hours of voting spread over six sites the first week, and 22 locations over the second 10 days.
The voter ID law limited early voting to a 10-day period, but counties were required to offer at least the same number of voting hours as they did during the 2012 election.
Monday’s vote came hours after Gov.
The memo, sent by NCGOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse on Sunday, said that Republican board members “should fight with all they have to promote safe and secure voting and for rules that are fair to our side”.
The board agreed to tweak the hours to include voting until 6 p.m.in the evening, but did not add any early morning hours and did not add any more than the single Saturday of voting that the law requires. “We did not reach an agreement of all board members”, she said in an email.
Mel Hartsell with Democracy NC was also at the meeting.
“I get exhausted of all the back and forth”, Nelson said.
“The state has…bent over backwards to make voting accessible”, Randall said to a crowd that let out a collective howl as residents pointed to the strongly-worded ruling saying North Carolina had targeted African-American voters with “almost surgical precision” when crafting the Voter ID law.
There is more controversy surrounding the upcoming election.
Two of those three groups-registered Democrats and black voters (who were 34 percent of the total county votes cast)-are reliably Democratic voters, while older voters (who were 13 percent of the total Mecklenburg votes cast) were 2-1 Republican voters. Board Chairman Patrick Nelson, a Republican appointee, said his goal is to ensure consistency and limit confusion among voters. Woodhouse’s own cousin, Eddie Woodhouse, the newest member of the Wake County elections board, tried unsuccessfully last week to push the board to eliminate early voting on Sunday and to remove an early voting site from North Carolina State University.
Among the recipients of his memo were Republican officials who sit on the three-member county boards that approve election schedules in each county. In counties where the board’s vote wasn’t unanimous, the State Board of Elections will review the plan and determine if it meets the “geographic, demographic and partisan interests of the county”. “Two plans will now go to the SBOE”.
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“We do not have a plan yet”.
