Felix Baker made it clear why he likes early voting.
"No lines, OK?" he said recently, just before heading into an early voting site in Apex.
A Wake County voter, registered as unaffiliated, Baker said it is critical that people get to exercise their right to vote and that early voting broadens that access.
Joy Walter, like Baker, a retiree and a Wake County voter, also said early voting is an essential option. Walter, a registered Democrat, said she will be out of town on Tuesday, March 5, which is Primary Election Day. She preferred to cast a ballot in person, versus mailing in an absentee ballot.
"You need to give people every opportunity they can to get out and vote," she said. "And sometimes one day, like me for example, I will be out of town, maybe I miss the deadline for absentee ballot, this gives me another avenue."
Two candidates want to see early voting curtailed
At least two North Carolina candidates running for office this year have suggested early voting in the state should be curtailed if not eliminated altogether.
As reported by CBS 17, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson said at a campaign event that voting should be restricted to Election Day only. Robinson is the leading GOP contender in the race for governor.
And State House Speaker Tim Moore, the Republican candidate for North Carolina's 14th Congressional District, recently told reporters that lawmakers could soon look at reducing the number of early voting days because of drop-offs in voter turnout over the course of the 17-day period.
Republican voter Larue Ulshafer said he shares that position. Ulshafer, a registered Republican, was campaigning for his wife who is running for a Granville County school board position.
"You just don't have enough people coming out, you know?" Ulshafer said.
"And you got, I forget how many, you got eight or nine people working in there," Ulshafer added, referring to the early voting site in Oxford, one of three early voting sites in Granville County.
Until his wife decided to run for office, Ulshafer had served on the Granville County Board of Elections.
He said he thinks early voting should be cut to just three days, the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before Election Day, which he contends would save money.
Early voter turnout continues to rise in NC
Sharon Iglesias, another Granville County voter and registered Republican, said she likes that early voting makes it easier for her to work going to the polls into her schedule.
"I don't see the reason to shorten it, actually," Iglesias added, when asked about candidates' comments about possibly curtailing North Carolina's early voting period.
Over at the public library in Creedmoor, another of Granville County's three early voting sites, Darell Bridgewater was presiding as the polling site's chief precinct judge.
Bridgewater is a Republican member of his bipartisan team of judges and has been working the polls in his county for years. He said early voting definitely helps boost voter participation.
"Especially when you can come in and register to vote, if you got an address change you can do that," he said, adding that voters can also handle name changes due to marriage at early voting sites.
Turnout for in-person early voting continues to grow cycle by cycle but in primaries, it still lags behind Election Day turnout.
According to State Board of Elections data, 474,242 voters cast early, in-person ballots in the 2008 primaries while more than 1.5 million went to the polls that Primary Election Day.
Early voting turnout has increased for every primary in a presidential cycle year since with 778,994 early, in-person cast in the 2020 primaries.
For general elections early, in-person voter turnout far outnumbers Election Day turnout and has since at least 2008.
In 2020, early in-person voters accounted for more than two-thirds of the more than 5.5 million voters who participated in that general election.
Early voting 'improves minority turnout'
Prior to 2002, you needed an excuse to cast an absentee ballot — and there wasn't a long early voting period with polling sites spread across a county.
In the mid-1990s, the North Carolina General Assembly undertook a comprehensive review of the state's elections laws. At the time, Gerry Cohen was the General Assembly's Director of Legislative Drafting and co-counsel to the Election Laws Review Commission.
"I was asked, basically, to look at potential legislation that would both improve election administration and increase turnout and voter participation," Cohen recently told WUNC.
Cohen is now one of the Democrats on Wake County's bipartisan Board of Elections. He said the changes to early voting in North Carolina were transformational.
"It improves minority turnout, clearly people that have non-flexible job hours and younger voters," Cohen said.
That is not to say there aren't ways early voting could be improved from a fiscal and administrative standpoint, according to Cohen.
He suggested giving counties more flexibility in planning early voting schedules. For example, as state law once allowed, letting counties open fewer early voting sites for quieter periods and then expanding the number closer to election day when voter turnout picks up.
