State election officials will decide which early-voting sites will open in Columbus County ahead of the November election, after the local elections board disagreed on a plan.
The five members of the Columbus County Board of Elections split along party lines on two proposals Monday night. The board’s three Republicans–Jillian McPherson-Edge, Lynn Fairfax, and Lynne Thompson–voted to open four early-voting sites in Whiteville, Chadbourn, Tabor City, and Riegelwood for 13 days. Fair Bluff, which has had an early-voting site since at least 2008, would not open under the plan.
Democrats Rodney Singletary and Wanda Brooks voted to open all five sites for 14 days.
Without a unanimous vote, which is required under North Carolina law, the State Board of Elections will make a final determination. The state board will likely decide in mid-August, spokesperson Patrick Gannon told the Border Belt Independent on Tuesday.
McPherson-Edge, the board chair, said in May she wanted the county to have only one early-voting site, at the elections office in Whiteville. She changed her proposal on June 8 to include three sites: Whiteville, Chadbourn, and Tabor City.
McPherson’s said it didn’t make sense financially to open sites at the Ransom Event Center in Riegelwood and Fair Bluff Fire and Rescue. It would cost $100 a day to operate the sites, which typically draw fewer voters than the county’s other early-voting sites, she said.
The Fair Bluff site saw 724 voters in the 2022 general election, according to County Elections Director Ashley Collins, while Whiteville saw 4,858.
“It is very clear that some early-voting locations consistently serve significantly fewer voters than others,” McPherson-Edge said at the June 8 meeting after dozens of residents spoke out against the reduction plan. “While every vote is important, we must also consider the costs associated with operating each site.”
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice criticized the plan to eliminate early-voting sites. More than 1,000 people cast early ballots at the Fair Bluff site in the 2020 and 2024 elections, when voters picked the U.S. president, according to the coalition.
The coalition said it was the “right” decision to keep the Riegelwood site open. But eliminating the Fair Bluff site would be “a betrayal to those voters who are still working to recover from natural disasters and are among the poorest in the county,” Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for voting rights with the group, told the Border Belt Independent on Tuesday.
Local residents and representatives from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the North Carolina NAACP spoke out against any reduction in voting sites on Monday. Jacob Brooks, North Carolina director of Patriotic Millionaires, a left-leaning advocacy group, applauded residents for pressuring the county elections board.
“The Board of Elections attempted to suppress thousands of voters in one of the most influential counties in North Carolina and got caught,” Brooks wrote in a press release. “That is because people in our communities showed up to meetings, knocked doors, made phone calls, and applied the necessary pressure to force the Board’s hand and abandon their original plan to close four, then two, and now just one of the five sites.”
Columbus County has the money to operate all five early-voting sites, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice said in a June 25 press release. County commissioners passed a budget this month that includes more than $688,000 in election expenditures for the fiscal year that starts July 1. That’s a 60% increase from 2022, the most recent midterm election.
Brooks and the coalition said they are concerned about what the state board will decide. In January, the state board rejected a plan for Columbus County to offer early-voting on a particular Sunday ahead of the primary in March. The five-site, 14-day early-voting plan includes a Sunday.
“Cutting Sunday is a clear effort to diminish the Souls to the Polls get-out-the-vote events popular with the county’s Black and African American religious communities,” said Harris Klein. “We urge the State Board to remedy these clear deficiencies and ensure a free and fair election for everyone in Columbus.”