The members of Alamance County’s board of elections have found themselves at loggerheads over one of the three early voting sites that will be activated ahead of next year’s March primary.
According to the county’s elections director Dawn Hurdle, the five member-bipartisan board readily agreed to set up two of the three early voting locations at the Graham Rec Center and the Mebane Arts and Community Center. But the board was unable to agree on the third location – with its three Republicans inclined toward Kernodle Senior Center in Burlington while its two Democrats championed the south gym at Elon University.
Hurdle said that the board ultimately split along party lines in a 3-to-2 decision that favored the Kernodle Senior Center – over the objections of the two Democratic appointees.
“Because it was not unanimous, we had to send it to the state board of elections,” she added in an interview earlier this week, “and at a date to be determined, the state board will hold a meeting and decide which site it will be.”
Like its county-level equivalent, the state board of elections has had a Republican majority ever since the GOP-dominated General Assembly wrested the control of these boards from the state’s Democratic Governor Josh Stein earlier this year. Prior to this move by the state legislature, a majority of the seats on both the state and local boards of elections were controlled by whichever party was in command of the governor’s mansion.
Party divisions weren’t as much of a factor when the county’s board of elections turned its attention to the schedule for early voting ahead of the primary.
According to Hurdle, the five-member board unanimously agreed to add one Saturday and one Sunday to the state’s mandated dates for this two-and-a-half week period, which begins on Thursday, February 12. The board’s members resolved to activate the county’s early voting locations for three hours on Sunday, February 15 and again on Saturday, February 21. The state, for its part, had already ordered local polling sites to be open on Saturday, February 28 for the final day of early voting before the primary on Tuesday, March 3.
