Republicans in North Carolina who control state and county election boards have attempted to move early voting sites off college campuses and reduce Sunday voting, which officials in both parties called a blatant attempt to make it harder for students and Black voters to cast ballots.
In Jackson, Pasquotank and Wake Counties, these Republicans pressured local election officials to move early voting sites away from college campuses, which are full of younger voters who tend to vote Democratic. They also instructed the officials in Pasquotank to end Sunday voting, which is popular among Black voters.
Democrats and voting rights groups say the changes are the result of pressure from the Republican state auditor, Dave Boliek, whose office has controlled the makeup of state and county election boards in North Carolina since 2024, when the legislature stripped that power from Governor-elect Josh Stein, a Democrat.
Mr. Boliek, who received Donald Trump’s endorsement in 2024, took office the following January and subsequently appointed Republican majorities, including a Republican chairperson, to every county election board. He also hired Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, to serve as his election “liaison” with the county boards.
Mr. Woodhouse subsequently went to work pressuring county board members to adjust their early voting locations and hours, according to text messages and emails.
“Drop Sunday,” read one of his texts to Larry Beatty, the Republican chairman of the five-member Pasquotank Board of Elections, according to records obtained by The Daily Advance, a local news organization.
Mr. Woodhouse also acknowledged in an email to every election board chairperson in the state that “there was some reduction in under utilized Sunday voting hours” but “we added more weekend hours by adding additional Saturday hours,” according to records obtained by The Times.
“Don’t let them have a vote,” read another text message from Mr. Woodhouse to Bill Thompson, the chairman of the Jackson County board, regarding an upcoming vote of the county board on a new early-voting plan, according to records obtained by another local news outlet, NC Local.
Mr. Woodhouse also gave Mr. Thompson instructions on how to respond to questions from a reporter at NC Local.
The potential changes, in as many as a dozen counties, have unleashed bipartisan outcry.
Mr. Stein, a Democrat, said in an interview he was “concerned about the politicization of election administration in North Carolina.”
“It’s clear that the auditor’s staff person, who was the former executive director of the Republican Party, has been interfering with and directing local county boards of elections on how to shape their early voting plans, and that’s just wrong,” Mr. Stein said. “I am not comforted by the partisan turn of the State Board of Elections, but that’s exactly what the Republican legislature had in mind for it when they took authority away from me and gave it to the auditor — the only auditor in the country, by the way, who oversees elections.”
Because many of the proposed changes failed to earn unanimous votes from the county boards, more than a dozen of them are in dispute and will be resolved in August by the State Board of Elections. That board, too, has a Republican majority appointed by Mr. Boliek.
Amid the furor, Mr. Boliek reassigned Mr. Woodhouse. On Monday, Mr. Woodhouse resigned.
In an interview, Mr. Boliek attributed the disputes to Democrats who were displeased with the changes in political control of every county board. “It went from an elected Democrat to an elected Republican, and I think Democrat activists are not happy about that,” Mr. Boliek said. He said his reassignment of Mr. Woodhouse was a function of timing and not the result of the controversy. Mr. Woodhouse was hired to help 100 new county chairs adjust to the role, he said, and now, with the primary election past, the position was no longer necessary.
Mr. Boliek also defended the changes to early voting made on his watch. According to data from the auditor’s office, the total number of early voting hours during the March primary increased from 45,512 hours to 48,048 hours, and the number of early voting sites statewide increased by 6 percent. “These are real numbers that nobody wants to print,” Mr. Boliek said.
But some county election officials have said they had heard directly from Mr. Boliek on proposed changes.
In Granville County, Larue Ulshafer, the chair of the county election board, defended moving an early voting site from Creedmoor, a predominantly Black area that had supported former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, to Oxford, a more white, rural Republican area.
The changes followed a “vision” Mr. Ulshafer had heard Mr. Boliek describe about “free and equal voting across the county, north, south and central,” in a meeting in Raleigh. Mr. Ulshafer described that encounter at a county meeting last month, according to audio obtained by The Times.
Mr. Boliek said in an interview that he had “talked to board chairs around the state of North Carolina about a lot of issues,” including his view that all early voting locations should have adequate parking and accessibility and reflect each county’s geographic diversity.
“Previously, the primary driver to locations of early voting sites was population density, and that often leaves voters who may live in parts of a county with a 50-minute drive to an early voting site,” Mr. Boliek said. But, he added, “our office hasn’t given any specific instruction.”
In other counties, officials relayed Mr. Boliek’s desires. Jay Pavey, a Republican member of the Jackson County Board of Elections, was giving a tour of a potential new early voting site to a local Republican official when he was given some unexpected directions.
“Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the auditor’s office out of Raleigh is extremely opposed to having any voting site on any university campus,” Mr. Pavey said in an interview, recounting what he was told.
Mr. Pavey was touring the Health and Human Sciences Building off Western Carolina University’s main campus. He had warmed to the university’s suggestion of using the building instead of a local recreation center that had been in use for decades, because it had a bigger parking lot, could remain staged throughout early voting and was reachable via a free campus transportation system for students. But local Republican officials passed along a warning from the auditor’s office.
“If we did not vote the way they wanted us to, then they were going to ensure that we got removed from the board at some point,” Mr. Pavey said in an interview. “So, of course, you know that doesn’t work with me.”
Mr. Boliek, in an interview, disputed those claims as “not true” and “rumor and innuendo.”
He pointed to data from The News and Observer that when including community colleges, 10 on-campus early voting sites operated during the primary this year, compared with nine in 2022.
But community colleges do have large on-campus student populations — which tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic — as do the colleges where early voting sites ended up in dispute during the primary, such as Western Carolina University, North Carolina A&T State University and Elon University.
Election officials in some counties that made controversial changes said they had never spoken to Mr. Woodhouse. Keith Weatherly, the Republican chairman of the Wake County Board of Elections, in Raleigh, said there was “not a bit of that, no strong-arming whatsoever” from Mr. Woodhouse or the auditor’s office. The board eventually decided to move an early voting site from a student center at North Carolina State University, near most student residences, to a business services center on another part of campus.
Mr. Weatherly said the new site was a mile down the road from the student center and “easily accessible” by the campus transportation system, while also offering a better parking spot for non-college voters. Wake County’s changes were passed unanimously.
Linda Devore, the board chairwoman in Cumberland County, said the decision to go from eight early voting sites to seven was budget-driven, as each site costs $30,000 to $40,000 to staff. “You’re asking whether we got any influence from the auditor’s office or from Woodhouse, and the answer is no,” Ms. Devore said in an interview. “We’ve had this in mind since we created our budget last fall.”
But Irene Grimes, one of the Democratic members of the Cumberland County board, saw outside influence in the decision.
“There is unprecedented influence and unprecedented, I think, misconduct going on,” Ms. Grimes said in an interview. “We need to make early voting as available as humanly possible. That’s kind of my overall thing. Some of my fellow board members disagree, to put it mildly, and to me it doesn’t matter whether an early voting site is in a red, green, purple or, I don’t know, alien area.”
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