(Photo: Clayton Henkel)
The state legislature stepped into the middle of local disputes over early voting by enacting a law requiring Henderson and McDowell counties to add more voting locations.
The bill, which was introduced and approved on Thursday, covers 13 western Helene-damaged counties, and requires that they have at least one early voting location for every 30,000 voters “or any portion thereof.” Only Henderson and McDowell don’t meet that requirement.
Henderson County has one early voting site and more than 92,000 registered voters as of last Saturday, according to state Board of Elections data.
Rep. Jennifer Balkcom, a Henderson County Republican, said the county usually has four early voting sites, but this year locations were reduced to one. Balkcom said she “waited in the traffic for 40 minutes to get to a parking space on Tuesday.”
McDowell County has about 31,000 registered voters and one early voting location.
The McDowell Republican Party asked for an additional site, but the local board of elections rejected the request, according to the McDowell News.
Siting early voting locations and setting hours are usually county board of election decisions.
Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Guilford County Democrat, said the Henderson elections board made its decision last summer based on funding and logistics.
“I’m reluctant to tell local governments what they have to do,” she said.
During a video briefing Thursday sponsored by the Secure Democracy Foundation, North Carolina Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell said the legislation will present challenges.
“Poll workers don’t grow on trees and they certainly don’t when you’re in a disaster situation where people may have been displaced,” she said. “If that is what the legislature enacts, we will do what we have to do. We follow the law.”
Early voting turnout across the state, including most of the Helene disaster counties, has set records.
Brinson Bell pointed to the turnout numbers as evidence that local election plans are working.
Republicans haven’t always been such fans of early voting.
Republicans passed a law in 2013 that, among other voting restrictions, cut the early voting period from 17 days to 10. A federal court struck down that law.
In 2016, former state Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse encouraged local elections boards, then controlled by Republicans, to reduce early voting hours and early voting locations, and to eliminate Sunday voting.
What’s different this year is former President Donald Trump’s campaign is urging its supporters to vote early, and most of the Helene disaster counties are heavily Republican.
North Carolina is a battleground state where each party is looking to get their voters to the polls.
Rep. Destin Hall, the House Rules Committee chairman, assured legislators that the $5 million the legislature gave the state Board of Elections to aid voting in disaster counties would help cover the cost of additional early voting sites.
The bill passed the House 106-2 and passed the Senate unanimously.