NC elections board rejects most Sunday voting, campus sites in disputed counties

RALEIGH, N.C. — Early voting locations and hours for the midterm elections are now set in every part of North Carolina.

In a marathon meeting on Thursday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections issued final decisions in the counties where early voting plans were contested, ruling in most cases against Sunday voting and in some cases against campus polling sites.

Thursday’s meeting stretched on for over 10 hours as the board heard testimony from each of the 20 counties that failed to reach a unanimous agreement on an early voting plan. In nearly every case, the state board sided with the plan proposed by the county board’s Republican majority in a party-line vote.

The hearing was marked by tense debate over the racial impact of cutting Sunday voting, the ability of students to vote without on-campus sites and the influence of the state auditor’s office on early voting plans.

The November midterms will be the first major election run by the state’s new Republican-majority elections board, a power shift that took effect last year after state lawmakers stripped Democratic Gov. Josh Stein of his appointments to the board and transferred them to Dave Boliek, the Republican state auditor.

Stein has sued over the change and criticized Boliek’s oversight of the board, telling reporters Thursday at an unrelated press conference that Republicans were “trying to tilt the field of play to make it harder for people who they think won’t support them, and easier for those who do. That’s just not right. It’s not right.”

Woodhouse influence looms large

Thursday’s board meeting came in the wake of a flurry of news stories regarding Dallas Woodhouse, the state auditor’s former elections liaison, and his attempts to influence early voting plans. Leaked texts showed Woodhouse, who previously served as executive director of the NC Republican Party, encouraging county election officials to cut Sunday voting and eliminate a campus voting site. And last week, Boliek’s office said that it learned Woodhouse had also deleted text messages that were subject to ongoing public records requests.

Woodhouse resigned from the auditor’s office last month, saying he had always intended his time in the newly created role to be short. He also said he is confident that, once the state board finalizes early voting plans, North Carolina will offer more total voting opportunities in the 2026 election than in the last midterms.

The board began its meeting Thursday with a tense debate over Woodhouse’s influence, with Democratic member Siobhan Millen proposing a motion to ban board members from working with the state auditor’s office in the future on matters that favor any “candidate, party, racial, ethnic, or age group.”

Stacy “Four” Eggers, one of the board’s Republican members, said the motion unfairly “singled out” the auditor.

“I think it is a faulty basis for informing our opinions and goes down a very slippery slope of trying to thought police,” he said.

Boliek, a Republican, makes appointments to state and county election boards after the General Assembly stripped that power from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in 2024. He is the only auditor in the country with such powers.

Board Chair Francis De Luca, a Republican, suggested that prior governors had also weighed in on election matters when they still had appointment power.

“No governor has ever gotten involved in the election process? Anybody here believe that?” he said.

Democratic board member Jeff Carmon responded by calling De Luca an “election denier.”

“You’ve been here long enough to know how this process works,” Carmon said.

“I resent you saying that to me,” De Luca replied.

The motion failed in a party-line vote.

“And with that said, I hope we never hear the name Dallas Woodhouse again,” De Luca said.

His wish was not fulfilled, as the specter of Woodhouse’s influence remained a point of contention throughout the meeting. Carmon questioned each board chair about their communications with him, though he and Millen noted that many board chairs who would have been in contact with Woodhouse were not present at Thursday’s hearing.

Board largely rules against Sunday voting

Of the 20 counties with disputed early voting plans, 15 disagreed, at least in part, over whether to host voting on Sunday.

In all but two of those counties, the state board’s Republican majority voted for the plan which included no Sunday voting.

Republican officials argued against Sunday voting for a variety of reasons, saying it was difficult to staff sites on Sundays or that their county lacked the budget for it. Other members invoked religious concerns.

“A day of rest on the Sabbath is a principle that we follow that was modeled by our creator,” Matt Longworth, a Republican board member in Anson County, said. “By having Sunday voting, we are requiring people to work on the Lord’s day, and I do believe that the downfall of this country will be contingent on what we do with God.”

Carmon said he was a Christian as well, but that he didn’t believe his faith prohibited voting on Sundays.

“And we live in a country with many other religions,” he said. “So I appreciate your conviction, but as a governmental body, we can’t push those religious convictions on the greater community.”

Democrats argued that offering voting on Sundays would give more opportunities to working voters as well as Black voters, whom data shows are more likely to cast their ballots on Sunday.

In some cases, Democratic officials suggested cutting a Saturday with longer hours from the schedule and instead offering a Sunday site with shorter availability.

Republicans countered that counties should choose a plan with a higher total number of hours, but Democrats said that Sundays would reach a different group of voters and had, in some past cases, resulted in a higher number of voters per hour than Saturdays.

Rebecca Whitaker, a Democratic board member in Lee County, said that in the 2022 midterms, Sunday was the second-busiest day of early voting.

Sunday voting was a frequent topic of discussion in Woodhouse’s leaked texts, in which he also suggested increasing Saturday hours in exchange for eliminating Sundays.

Jay DeLancy, a Republican board member in Lee County, said at Thursday’s hearing that he hadn’t even considered cutting Sunday voting until Woodhouse suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to restrict the Voting Rights Act would make such cuts less vulnerable to legal challenges.

Of the 80 counties that submitted unanimous early voting plans to the state, 13 included at least one day of Sunday voting.

Board approves WCU site, denies UNCG and NC A&T

Of the many disagreements the state board was called on to resolve Thursday, perhaps one of the most notable was Jackson County’s dispute over whether to host a polling site on Western Carolina University’s campus.

The site in question sparked the first controversy over Woodhouse’s involvement in early voting plans after Republican members of the Jackson County board said they’d been pressured by the auditor’s office to vote against it. The board ended up voting 3-1 in favor of the WCU site, with the board chair, Bill Thompson, being the sole vote against it.

Jay Pavey, one of the Republicans on Jackson’s board, urged the state board on Thursday to support the WCU site and noted that Thompson had not shown up to explain his opposition to it.

“We clearly know that the office of the auditor of this state, through his surrogates, has been pressuring people,” he said. “And in this case, he did pressure the individual that is not here today to defend that vote.”

The state board unanimously approved the WCU site in a compromise plan that also adopted a local recreation center, which Thompson had pushed for.

The board’s Republican majority did not, however, support early voting sites at UNC Greensboro and N.C. A&T State University, a contentious issue that prompted a lawsuit from students earlier this year when the same sites were denied for the primary election.

UNCG and A&T did not host voting in the last midterm elections, but Guilford County board member Carolyn Bunker, a Democrat, said the students had made compelling cases for adding sites and that denying them would show that “we don’t respect them and that they’re not equal citizens.”

“Providing accessible early voting on campuses is about more than convenience,” she said. “It’s about inclusion, civic participation and sending a message to a generation of young people: you matter, your voice matters, and you are welcome here.”

Eggers took offense to Bunker’s remarks and noted that her fellow Democrat on the Guilford board voted in favor of the majority plan without the campus sites.

“I just simply don’t appreciate the rhetoric around your presentation of, if we don’t do what you say ... that we are telling students that they are not equal citizens,” Eggers said. “That is simply inappropriate. It is untrue. It is incorrect, and they have just as much right to vote as any other citizen.”

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(Capitol Bureau Chief Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan contributed reporting.)

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