Four out of five votes is normally enough to get something done on a five-member board.
When it comes to setting early voting sites in North Carolina, however, four out of five isn’t quite good enough.
That’s why the North Carolina State Board of Elections will have the final say on Guilford County’s early voting plan for the Tuesday, Nov. 3 general election.
The Guilford County Board of Elections voted 4-1 in July for a plan with 17 early voting sites; however, state law requires a unanimous vote from a county elections board to approve an early voting plan locally.
Democratic board member Carolyn Bunker cast the lone vote against the majority plan.
The disagreement centers on four potential early voting locations and, in particular, whether Guilford County should operate early voting sites on the campuses of NC A&T State University and UNC Greensboro.
The four-member majority supported a plan based largely on the 15-site plan Guilford County used for the 2022 midterm election – with Stokesdale Town Hall and Union Square Campus added to bring the number of sites to 17.
Union Square is on East Gate City Boulevard in Greensboro and is a collaborative educational facility involving NC A&T, UNCG, Guilford Technical Community College and Cone Health.
Bunker submitted an alternate plan that would also have 17 sites but would leave out Stokesdale Town Hall and Union Square and instead include early voting sites on the UNCG and NC A&T campuses.
One argument for putting sites on college campuses is that students might have more trouble than others getting to alternative early voting sites. Some county residents, however, don’t like the fact that people can come to the county for a few years and then make consequential votes that they don’t have to live with when they move on. Some Republicans don’t want county boards to bend over backward to help college students votes because they believe that, overall, the college population tends to be more liberal than conservative.
The county’s official website identifies the 17-site proposal supported by four members as a “non-unanimous Majority Plan” and makes clear that it hasn’t been finally approved.
Under North Carolina law, county boards of elections may establish their early voting plans by unanimous vote. When the members can’t agree unanimously, the dispute goes to the State Board of Elections.
That means an 80 percent majority on the Guilford board wasn’t enough.
And the choice facing the State Board isn’t necessarily limited to simply picking the four-member majority plan or Bunker’s alternative.
Collicutt told the Rhino Times that, although the State Board usually chooses one of the plans submitted by county board members, it has considerably more freedom than that.
“They typically do choose one or the other, but they don’t have to,” Collicutt said. “They could craft something, a hybrid. They could go a different direction. They could tweak here and tweak there.”
He added, “It’s not an A or B option. It’s typically an A or B option – but they could come up with an option C.”
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has scheduled the non-unanimous county early voting plans for consideration Thursday, Aug. 20.
The State Board’s meeting notice places Guilford in the group of counties where local election board members disagree over early voting locations or over locations as well as dates or times.
According to Collicutt, whatever the State Board decides will establish the final early voting plan Guilford County uses for the November election.
