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.