It seems that we cannot have a session of the North Carolina General Assembly without a struggle over how many days of early voting North Carolina should have or which days the option should be available.
The opening salvo in the 2025 legislative early voting fight addresses both questions.
House Bill 66 would change the start of the early voting period from the “third Thursday” before election day to the “second Monday,” reducing the period from seventeen days to six and eliminating Sunday voting.
The bill’s primary sponsors are Wyatt Gable (R-Onslow), Steve Tyson (R-Craven), Keith Kidwell (R-Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, and Pamlico), and Paul Scott (R-Cleveland and Rutherford). It is no accident that all of the sponsors are Republicans. Democrats have long dominated early voting, so members of both major parties believe that more days of early voting would help Democrats and fewer days of early voting would help Republicans.
Both are probably wrong.
Fewer Days of Early Voting Does not Necessarily Mean Fewer Votes
One persistent myth about early voting is that the number of votes is strictly proportional to the number of days. So, for example, if four million people planned to vote early and legislators cut the number of early voting days in half, total turnout would drop by two million.
That is not true. Most voters who plan to vote early would shift to one of the still-available early voting days. Others would change to voting absentee or on election day.
I wrote about this in the context of a 2024 bill that would have cut early voting to seven days (Rather than repeat myself, I will copy myself.):
If we reduced the early voting period from 17 days to seven, are we to suppose that the 275,720 votes cast during the first 10 days of early voting in the 2024 primary would disappear?
The good news is that we do not have to suppose. Research has already been done on the effect of early voting on turnout. While results vary, most studies have found that early voting does not increase voter turnout. Some studies have found that early voting is associated with decreased voter turnout. A 2019 report on early voting in North Carolina found “little evidence that changes to early opportunities in North Carolina had uniform effects on voter turnout.”
So, reducing early voting days would move votes to other days, not significantly lower overall turnout. Counties should still be required to have common hours for all their early voting sites to minimize any small impact that a reduction in early voting days might have.
Still, early voting can have benefits beyond turnout. By shortening lines on election day, early voting could reduce stress on voters and election officials. Spreading voting across several days can alert officials to problems in the process so they can correct them before voting has ended.
More Early Voting Does Not Necessarily Help Democrats
Early voting has long been seen as a boon to Democrats, helping them offset Republican dominance in election-day voting. So, the thinking goes that anything increasing early voting opportunities would help Democrats gain more votes.
Even if we accepted the myth that more early voting equals more votes, that does not mean they would always be more Democratic votes.
As people’s voting habits change and the parties try new get-out-the-vote tactics, a voting method that once favored one party can change to favor the other. For example, while Democrats dominated absentee voting in North Carolina in 2020, more Republicans than Democrats used that method in the three previous presidential elections.
While not as extreme as the absentee voting shift in favor of Democrats in 2020, 2024 saw an early voting shift in favor of Republicans. The Republican Party and allied groups ran a “bank your vote” effort to encourage more supporters to vote early. It worked. As seen at the John Locke Foundation’s Vote Tracker, more Republicans than Democrats voted early in 2024.
The result is that Donald Trump won the majority of North Carolina’s early votes in 2020. More broadly, early voting went from being a consistent Democratic advantage to a microcosm of the state electorate. In every Council of State race, the overall winner, regardless of party, also won the early vote.
There was an exception to that Republican trend. Democrats continued to dominate Sunday voting. They outvoted Republicans 39 to 26 percent on the first Sunday of early voting and 35 to 28 percent on the second Sunday. At least part of that Democratic advantage on Sundays is due to the party’s Souls to the Polls campaigns with Black churches and organizations. However, just as Republicans overtook Democrats in early voting overall in 2024, there is nothing to prevent Republicans from organizing their own Souls to the Polls events with conservative evangelical churches.
Democrats were also helped by a disproportionate number of left-leaning counties open for Sunday voting. For example, 59 percent of the 22 counties that voted for Kamala Harris had early voting on Sunday, October 27, compared to just 29 percent of the 78 counties that voted for Donald Trump.
So, Is there an Ideal Number of Early Voting Days?
So, within limits, the question about how many days of early voting is not about turnout or which party benefits. It is about election administration.
Early voting is not free. County election boards have to pay for personnel to man early voting sites and rent sites where free locations, such as empty government buildings, are not available. Reducing the number of early voting days would help officials redirect resources elsewhere.
However, there can be diminishing returns on savings from reducing early voting days. Counties may feel a need to open more locations if the number of early voting days is reduced severely, at least partially negating the financial and administrative benefits of fewer days.
So, what is to be done?
I suggested a possible compromise when a debate about the ideal number of early voting days flared up last year:
Since reducing early voting days is associated with the political Right and calls for more Sunday voting are associated with the Left, a reasonable compromise could be to reduce the early voting period from 17 days to somewhere between seven and 10 days and to require all counties to open early voting sites for the one Sunday within that period. The resources saved through reducing the early voting period would make requiring Sunday voting during that period less onerous. The change would also benefit voters by giving them equal access to early voting in every county.
Even if the fight over early voting days is largely based on myths, such a compromise would provide real benefits to taxpayers, election officials, and voters.
