Students protest as NC elections officials cut some Sunday voting, campus polling sites :: WRAL.com

Republicans took control of elections administration in mid-2025 and, in some counties, they have quickly moved to enact two longtime party goals: Eliminating Sunday hours and campus polling places during early voting.

Those decisions led to political disputes in a handful of counties statewide, which the GOP-majority State Board of Elections settled in a meeting Tuesday.

Those and other issues were at the heart of contentious early voting plans in a dozen counties, including Cumberland, Harnett, Wayne and others. All failed to receive unanimous support at the county level and required final approval by the state elections board.

The plans are for the March primaries only. But the outcomes Tuesday could give clues to how willing the state board might be to allow similar strategies in November.

Republican board member Stacy Eggers IV said he was comfortable eliminating Sunday voting hours and other options because North Carolina already has a lengthy early voting period, in addition to other voting options.

“We have most ample opportunities in the nation for people to vote between our early voting, between our no excuse absentee voting, between the hours we have on Election Day,” he said.

North Carolina Republicans’ efforts to target Sunday voting in the recent past have been ruled unconstitutional due to intentional racial discrimination against Black voters. Many Black churches organize “souls to the polls” marches or other events in conjunction with election season.

And on Tuesday, dozens of Black voters came to the elections board meeting holding signs protesting the votes that the GOP-majority board took. In addition to eliminating Sunday voting in a handful of counties, the board also rejected a trio of college campus polling places, including at NCA&T University in Greensboro, the nation’s largest HBCU.

“This is calculated,” Olu Rouse, an NCA&T student from Cary, said in an interview after the meeting. “This is a strategy, and it’s actively trying to suppress our votes.”

Ultimately, their protests failed as the board’s Republican majority voted each time Tuesday in favor of the plans targeting Sunday and campus voting options.  The votes were all 3-2 party-line votes with the Republicans in favor and the Democrats opposed.

In Greene County, for instance, data shows that Sunday is the most popular option during early voting based on the number of voters per hour, according to Ben Lanier, a Democrat who serves on the local county board of elections. 

“The evidence clearly demonstrates that Sunday voting has been effective and necessary for Greene County voters,” Lanier said. “There is no valid justification for eliminating Sunday hours.”

But the state elections board voted to get rid of Sunday voting there after the county board chairman, Republican Jody Tyson, said they’d need to have two or three people volunteer to help work Sundays, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find anyone.

Campus voting protest

Rouse and about 50 other students from N.C. A&T University in Greensboro were ejected from the meeting after causing a disruption when the board shot down a plan that would’ve created an early voting site on campus.

“They tried to silence us here,” Zayveon Davis, an NCA&T student from Durham, said at an impromptu rally afterward. “But they know that outside of that conference room, they cannot do anything to stop our voices from being heard.”

The board also rejected a UNC-Greensboro site. And the board voted to shut down a popular site at Western Carolina University, citing concerns over parking that one of the local elections board members said were entirely false since they involved a parking lot which, she said, isn’t even the one used for voting.

“It’s a war on students, it’s very clear,” Democratic board member Siobhan Millen said after the vote rejecting the NCA&T and UNC-G sites. 

“No, it isn’t,” Republican board chairman Francis De Luca responded.

“What is it then, when you tell them they can’t have a site?” Democratic board member Jeff Carmon asked.

De Luca responded by employing a mocking tone of voice, saying: “I want a site, I want a site.”

The students then got up, interrupting the meeting and waving signs until being kicked out. Outside, several students questioned the Republican board members’ stated reasons for shooting them down, of being concerned about costs or efficiency.

“It’s not a matter of them not being able to allocate workers or funds towards us,” NCA&T junior Shia Rozier said, noting student groups had offered to staff the polling for free to save the county money. “It’s simply them not wanting us to vote.”

Sunday voting

Republican state lawmakers’ most recent effort to target Sunday voting — part of wider-ranging changes to state election law passed in 2013 — was struck down in federal court as unconstitutional for being explicitly motivated by racial animus. Black voters use Sunday voting disproportionately more than white voters, a fact GOP lawmakers noted when they wrote and passed the law.

 At the time, Republican lawmakers argued in court that they should be allowed to target Black voters because the majority of Black voters are affiliated with the Democratic Party. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit strongly disagreed, striking down the law in a harshly worded ruling, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.”

That law also included multiple other changes to election law, all similarly crafted using public data to target Black voters. Republicans haven’t tried seriously since that high-profile loss in court to eliminate Sunday voting statewide. Some did cosponsor a bill at the legislature to do so in 2025, but GOP leaders didn’t allow it up for a vote.

During Tuesday’s meeting, instead of repeating the prior argument from that 2013 lawsuit that it should be fair game for Republicans to target Black voters for political gain, the election board’s Republican members instead said they felt eliminating Sunday voting was good to give election staffers some rest during a busy election season.

‘We reached a different conclusion’

It remains to be seen whether new county-by-county efforts to target Sunday voting, by GOP activists and attorneys who now control county and state boards of elections, will meet similar legal fates.

So far, two small-scale efforts to target Sunday voting have been allowed in the state. WRAL reported in August that GOP officials in Davidson and Union counties asked to cut back on Sunday voting for the 2025 municipal elections, which the state elections board approved in 3-2 votes along party lines.

During Tuesday’s meeting Carmon, who is Black, spoke of his own family’s history being stopped from voting during the Jim Crow era. “My father, a Vietnam vet, fought for this country — and, he reminded me last night, came home to a country where he still was treated as a second-class citizen,” Carmon said. “So he charged me to come in here today and fight.”

Carmon also referenced De Luca’s opening speech after Republicans took control of the elections board last year, implying that De Luca is now going against his word by preparing to slash voting opportunities.

“At our first meeting with you as chair, you stated you want to have a fair election, make voting easy and make sure the law is followed and make sure that there is trust in the election system.”

De Luca didn’t respond to Carmon’s accusation. But Eggers indicated to Carmon that the board’s GOP majority felt comfortable with voting to undo Sunday voting hours.

“I agree with your sentiments, but we reached a different conclusion,” he told Carmon.

Millen, the board’s other Democratic member, said the public likes Sunday voting. She questioned the motivation of GOP officials to get rid of it.

“I got 222 emails just yesterday, and I’ve gotten over 1,000 in the last couple of weeks, and I didn’t hear from anyone that said we shouldn’t have more voting sites, we shouldn’t have Sundays,” Millen said. “Every single one, from people that reached out and used their First Amendment right to petition their government, wanted to keep college voting, wanted to keep Sunday voting.”

But local officials say they’re having trouble keeping polling places open. And particularly for a primary election, when turnout is historically low, they question how much value Sunday voting truly adds to their communities.

In Pitt County, the GOP majority on the county elections board says only a few dozen people have bothered showing up to vote on Sundays in each of the past few primary elections. Paying to keep the sites open for such a little return isn’t a good investment for the county, they argue in filings to the state, not to mention the fact that there are fewer and fewer people who want to help work at local polling places.

“Pitt County, like every other county in the state, is seeing a significant drop in civic engagement, particularly with election workers,” the board’s Republicans wrote to the state. “Finding workers to manage and work in locations, especially on Sundays, is extraordinarily difficult.”

In other counties, including Cumberland and Harnett, the disputes didn’t involve Sunday voting or college access but rather the number and location of early voting polling places.