Easing early voting. Or not.
When North Carolina’s Republican legislature ordered all early-voting sites to stay open 12 hours a day for 18 days this year, they called it a move to boost voting.
It’s not turning out that way.
Many poorer counties don’t have the resources to comply, and more than half — including many rural, disproportionately minority ones — have had to close some early-voting sites
Sprawling Halifax County, 700 square miles and 52 percent African-American, closed two of its three early-voting sites. Now a drive to cast a ballot is as long as 20 miles. It had cost about $6,000 to open the sites for the last week of early voting in 2014. The new policy raised that to nearly $48,000, “which didn’t include overtime,” said David Hines, the county election board chairman.
[In Tuesday’s election, the right to vote is still at issue.]
This was not the first such effort. In 2016, a federal appeals court struck down another legislative early-voting measure, saying it targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Many counties saw no need for the latest requirement, since they had been operating more sites for fewer hours or fewer days to affordably meet the needs of their voters.
