Early Voting Sites in North Carolina’s 2020 Election

By Chris Cooper

The hangover from the 2000 election took a while to get over. A full year later, folks were dressing up as “hanging chads” for Halloween and “Palm Beach County” soon became known less as a popular retirement destination and more as the home of the “butterfly ballot.” No amount of Goody’s headache powder could save either side from the hangover of the most contested and contentious election of the previous century.

But hangovers aren’t all bad—they usually remind you that you should take better care of yourself. And, for Americans after the 2000 election, the thing we could do to take better care of ourselves was to pay more attention not just to the candidates in the election, but to the process of how we conduct elections—how we design ballots, how we train poll workers, who counts ballots, and where we put polling sites. And, in case the effects of that 20-year-old hangover were beginning to fade, along comes to 2020 to remind us that attention to election administration is key to a well-functioning democracy.

While the election administration talk in North Carolina is currently focused on absentee vote by mail (as it should be), in person early voting starts in North Carolina on October 15 and the State Board of Elections recently released their list of early voting sites across the state, so it seems like an ideal time to do a quick analysis of the sites and compare them to 2016, in preparation for early voting. The number and placement of sites is critical to a well-functioning democracy. As numerous studies have found, people are more likely to vote if they have a polling place close to their homes, and this effect is particularly acute for those from a lower socioeconomic status.

 The Basics: Counting Early Voting Sites in 2020

In all, there are 462 total early voting sites in North Carolina in 2020. While about a fifth of all counties (19) counties include just a single early voting site, the average county has just shy of 5 sites. As the table below demonstrates, the plurality of counties have between 2 and 5 sites. Taken together, there is about one site for every 13,429 registered voters in the average county.

I also ran some relatively simple statistical models to determine the characteristics that tend to be associated with counties that have more early voting sites. Here, it appears that larger counties, in terms of square miles, are somewhat more likely to have more early voting sites. Counties with a larger proportion of registered Republicans are also more likely to have more sites. Race and the number of registrants appears to have no effect on the number of sites in a county.

Comparison to 2016

In all, there are 15 more early voting sites in North Carolina in 2020 than in 2016. One quarter (25) of all North Carolina counties have fewer sites than they had in 2016, 43 remained constant and 32 have more sites than they had in 2016.

 Sunday Voting

Counties also have some discretion over whether to implement Sunday voting during the early voting period. As you can see in the table below, voters can vote at at least one early voting site on one Sunday during early voting in 13 counties, while 30 counties offer Sunday voting at least one site on both Sundays during the early voting period.

 

Running a fairly simple statically model reveals that areas with higher proportions of African Americans are more likely to have Sunday voting, while the partisanship of the registrants, size of the county in terms of square miles and number of registrants has no relationship to the number of sites. By running a simulation where we assume an average county in every other way, a county with the smallest proportion of African Americans would have about a .32 odds of having Sunday voting, while at the maximum proportion of African Americans in the state, the odds approach 100% (.96). These statistics play out in relatively important geographic patterns. For example, in the 11^th Congressional District, only one county (Buncombe) offers Sunday voting.

 

Comparison to 2016

In all, the state has added Sunday voting locations since 2016. Only one County has decreased the number of early voting Sundays (from 2 Sundays to 1), while 8 counties increased from voting on just one Sunday to voting on two Sundays. Most impressively, 25 counties had no Sunday voting available in 2016, but have Sunday voting available on both Sundays at at least one location in 2020.

Wrapping Up

Ballot access is critical to a well-functioning democracy, and while North Carolina's (and the country’s) attention is rightfully focused on absentee by mail access at the moment, our collective attention will soon turn to questions surrounding in person early voting. This brief exploration of early voting sites reinforces that, even in a pandemic, voters need to have access to a proper number of early voting sites. Counties have wide discretion to recommend the number of voting sites that work for them and, as this brief exploration should make clear, the situation in terms of number of counties and availability of Sunday voting varies widely throughout the state.

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*note: thanks to some eagle-eyed readers who pointed out that the funky formatting in the tables was leading to a few counties not being listed. The problem should now be fixed. My apologies.

Chris Cooper is Madison Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University. He tweets at @chriscooperwcu.