Critics of early-voting plans adopted this year by North Carolina Republicans are accusing GOP leaders of discrimination, alleging that they’re eliminating sites and days preferred by Black voters. The allegations framed tense debate among state and local elections officials during a meeting Thursday.
The 2026 midterm elections will be the first major general election since Republicans took control of the state’s election administration. In all 100 North Carolina counties, as well as at the state level, Republicans now control a majority on the boards of election that decide administrative issues such as where to put early-voting sites, when to open those sites and more. Republican appointees have three seats on those county boards. Democratic appointees have two.
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The political flip followed passage of a law after the 2024 elections that took election administration power from the Democratic governor and gave it to the Republican state auditor.
In 80 counties, the 2026 early-voting plans passed with unanimous and bipartisan agreement. But in 20 counties, there were fights over proposals — many of which eliminate some voting on Sundays, which data shows is disproportionately used by Black voters.
Supporters of the changes say it helps county boards, which often struggle to staff early-voting sites on weekends. Republicans have also defended their plans by saying they offer more total hours of early voting even if they eliminate Sundays in some counties, and some believe that going to church should take priority.
The State Board of Elections met Thursday to debate the plans and choose which to allow to be used this fall — siding with GOP-proposed plans in most cases.
Critics of the changes say eliminating Sunday hours unfairly targets Black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. Critics allege that the changes are intended to benefit Republicans in this swing state.
Matt Longworth, one of the Republican county election board members from Anson County, said allowing people to vote on Sundays is part of the “downfall of this country.” The plan backed by him and his fellow Republican eliminates Sunday voting in that majority-minority community near Charlotte.
“By having Sunday voting, we are requiring people to work on Lord's Day, and I do believe that the downfall of this country will be contingent on what we do with God,” he said.
Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who leads the group NC Jews For Justice, told WRAL earlier this week she and fellow Jewish voters rely on Sundays to get things done, including voting, because of their own religious beliefs. “Observant Jews are not going to go to the polls on Saturday,” she said. “That is related to Jewish law. … But for many other Jews, Saturday is a time you go to Shul, you go to synagogue, and then you spend time with your family. And then you can go, if it's available, can go vote on Sunday.”
Thursday’s meeting became heated from the start, with Democratic board member Jeff Carmon accusing the chairman, Republican appointee Francis De Luca, of being an “election denier” based on statements he’s made about election results in the past. De Luca retorted: “I resent you saying that about me. You have no basis in fact to say that.” In a response to WRAL’s inquiry about the back-and-forth, De Luca said he didn’t know how to even define the phrase “election denier.”
Siobhan Millen, the board’s other Democratic member, made accusations of one of the other Republican board members. Millen, citing public records, alleged that Angela Hawkins was “heavily involved” behind the scenes in helping craft the early-voting plans in ways to advantage Republican Party candidates.
Millen questioned whether it was ethical for Hawkins to now have a role in voting to approve or deny those plans. Hawkins declined to recuse herself from the vote and didn’t comment on Millen’s remarks during the meeting. In a response to WRAL, Hawkins disputed the characterization, saying she wasn’t heavily involved in the early-voting plans.
When election boards were under Democratic control in past elections, the state board typically sided with fellow Democrats when voting on disputed county-level plans. Likewise, the board’s new majority sided with their fellow Republicans on most of the disputed plans up for a vote Thursday.
Details of the plans
Disputes over the early-voting plans range from big urban areas around Greenville and Greensboro to smaller rural places such as tiny Greene County. Many of the 20 disputed plans are in central North Carolina — from the outskirts of the Triangle to Rocky Mount and Fayetteville.
They include fights over Sunday voting in Chatham, Lee, Harnett, Nash and Wayne counties. On Thursday, the state board’s GOP majority approved GOP-backed plans eliminating Sunday voting in all but Lee. For Lee County, the local and state elections officials agreed to a compromise plan where the county will have one Sunday open for voting, but not voting on either Saturday during early voting.
On the Wayne County plan, Republican county board member Tristan Beard said fewer than 3% of ballots there were cast on Sunday in the last midterm election, in 2022. “Sunday voting in Wayne County simply isn't popular enough among our voters, regardless of party affiliation, gender, or race,” he said, echoing claims made by some GOP officials from other counties, too.
Democrats say polling places aren’t open long on Sundays, and often there are more people voting per hour on Sundays than on other days. But either way, citing the number of people who voted in a past election isn’t a good enough excuse to take Sunday away as an option in the future, Carmon said Thursday.
“You're looking at the past,” Carmon said. “We're in the present. And there's a significant amount of energy around the election. Why would you limit people's opportunity to vote?”
Additionally, there were fights over whether to eliminate early voting sites in the towns of Spring Lake, Oxford and Creedmoor — all towns where Black and Hispanic residents make up a majority of the population. Republican appointees excluded Spring Lake from Cumberland County’s early voting plan. In Granville County, they left out an Oxford site but kept a site in Creedmoor.
Democratic appointees fought to keep the sites. Carmon told his fellow board members: “We should carefully examine any policy that reduces opportunities for people to participate. I would also ask a simple question: Can we identify a single voter who is better served by having fewer opportunities to cast a ballot?”
De Luca dismissed his comments as a “political speech.”
In other parts of the state, Republicans have also pushed to not put early-voting sites on college campuses. College students and professors also tend to lean Democratic.
In Wake County, the GOP appointees previously won unanimous approval for their plan that got rid of a longtime early-voting site at the Talley Student Union on N.C. State University’s campus. Democrats agreed to go along with the plan; in the end it shifted the N.C. State site to a more remote part of campus, rather than eliminating it entirely.
On Thursday, state officials approved an early voting plan for Guilford County that excludes potential sites at UNC-Greensboro and N.C. A&T University. In Jackson County, however, state officials approved a plan that preserves an early voting site at Western Carolina University.
The request to preserve the WCU site came at the request of Jay Pavey, a Republican member of the Jackson County elections board. Speaking to state officials Thursday, Pavey accused Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek of using “surrogates” to pressure at least one Jackson County board member to pick a different site. A spokesman for Boliek denied Pavey’s claims, saying in a brief statement to WRAL that they are not true.
Democrats on the state elections board asked Pavey about Dallas Woodhouse, a Republican operative who Boliek hired last year to be his “eyes and ears on the ground in our elections process," Boliek said at the time. Woodhouse in June contacted the Jackson board chairman about the county’s plans, NC Local reported. Then last month, Woodhouse resigned from his role in Boliek's office amid scrutiny into his involvement with local plans. De Luca, the state board chairman, said Pavey’s comments about Woodhouse would be hearsay, since Pavey acknowledged that he hadn’t spoken with Woodhouse directly.
Woodhouse applauded the state board’s decision Thursday to keep the WCU site and order the reopening of an additional site: the Cullowhee Recreation Center. “Everybody wins. The rec center was preserved, which was all we ever cared about,” Woodhouse said in a social media post.
Sunday voting
Much of the debate has centered on Sunday voting.
Republicans say they offer more total hours of early, in-person voting even by eliminating Sundays in some counties. But for Democrats, offering more total hours by keeping the polls open longer on other days isn’t as important as keeping Sunday as an option.
Many Black churches host “souls to the polls” events on Sundays during early voting, during which churches often organize marches to the polls. State data shows that Black voters favor Sundays disproportionately more than white voters, who lean Republican.
In 2013 the Republican-led state legislature passed a law cutting Sunday voting, but it was by a federal court that declared their actions unconstitutional due to intentional racial discrimination.
Bishop William Barber, a preacher and progressive activist who leads the group Repairers of the Breach, said he’ll consider legal action if the early-voting proposals pass. Barber previously led the North Carolina NAACP, including when it won that 2013 lawsuit against GOP-backed election changes.
“What we should be doing is expanding opportunity to vote,” Barber told WRAL this week. “Any cut makes no sense. Why would you retrogress? People have already been allowed to vote on Sunday. … Why do you keep wanting to play around with the people's election? That's the fundamental question.”
He added that if Republicans do go forward with these efforts to cut voting sites in Black communities, or on days Black people favor, he thinks it could backfire on them and encourage people to become even more politically involved.
“We're going to make every day Sunday — and the Sabbath is going to have no end,” Barber said. “We're going to make every day Sunday. Monday’s going to be Sunday. Tuesday’s going to be Sunday. Wednesday’s going to be Sunday. Thursday’s going to be Sunday. Friday’s going to be Sunday. Saturday’s going to be Sunday. Sunday’s going to be Sunday. We’re going to march every day.”
Legal history
Years ago, Republican state lawmakers admitted in court documents that their goal in targeting Sunday voting was specifically because it was popular with Black voters. They said that since Black voters overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, it should be OK for Republicans to target them for political means. That was the impetus behind the 2013 election law, before it was blocked in federal court.
At the time, Republican state legislators used state data to find out information such as which days Black voters disproportionately went to vote, discovered it was Sunday, then cut Sunday voting. They used similar racial research to inform other policies in that law, such as what types of photo identification to allow or disallow for voters.
When sued, GOP leaders wrote in court filings that they passed the law because “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit cited those claims when it struck down the law for racial discrimination. “In what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the state’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race,” the judges wrote.
The ruling added that the rules proposed then “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” and that judges viewed it as no coincidence that Republicans sought to implement them “in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting.”
De Luca, the elections board chairman, was heavily involved in pushing for the passage of that 2013 law in his previous role leading a conservative Raleigh group, the Civitas Institute, which is now called the John Locke Foundation. On Thursday, he declined to comment on that prior work.