In advance, there’s no definitive way to gauge the impact of pending cutbacks to opportunities for Sunday voting in North Carolina’s upcoming midterm elections. But the intent behind those cuts is crystal-clear: They are meant to suppress the number of votes cast by African-Americans – votes that tend to favor Democratic candidates.
The Republican legislators and election officials who decry Sunday voting, offered in recent years as a common option during early voting prior to Election Day, offer various rationales. They say it’s not worth the expense to counties of opening polling places to accommodate what they describe as sparse numbers of voters. (Some actual metrics, of the voters per hour type, suggest otherwise.) They say poll officials ought not to have to work on Sundays, that polling places are difficult to staff on that day and that voting doesn’t belong on the Sabbath agenda.
Well, no one has been forced to vote on Sunday in any case. But for many people, especially with demanding schedules or who perhaps depend on others for transportation, Sunday voting makes perfect sense.
That’s especially the case if their church supports “souls to the polls” – a voter-engagement tactic well-known within predominantly African-American congregations, rallying their members to go vote after Sunday services. It’s that kind of motivated and focused turnout among a heavily Democratic bloc which Republican strategists want to derail.
Make no mistake: Sunday voting still will be widely available before the high-stakes election on Nov. 3. But the Republicans who now set and enforce North Carolina’s election rules essentially have pushed to limit it as much as they can get away with. That was the upshot of the Aug. 20 meeting of the State Board of Elections, during which voting schedules that officials in 20 counties hadn’t agreed on – because of partisan splits – were approved.
Schedules for the other 80 counties were set at the local level when county election board members, each with three Republican members and two Democrats, supported them unanimously, but sometimes with compromises that could affect Democratic turnout.
In Wake County, for example, the approved plan replaces a customary early voting site on the N.C. State University campus with one on the campus fringe less convenient to many students. Republicans’ antipathy to student voting ranks right up there with hostility to voting on Sunday, for the same reason – they think it’s too Democrat-friendly!
Campus early-voting sites at UNC Greensboro and N.C. A&T State University were scratched despite vigorous protests this year from students dating back to the primary elections, when those sites were first dropped. It has to be said that under a Republican regime that likes to salute President Trump’s cynical “election integrity” efforts, making it easier for A&T’s many Black students to vote, shaped up as a non-starter from the get-go. In other words, if you can’t suppress those votes, you’re just not trying.
According to reporting by Kyle Ingram in The News & Observer of Raleigh, Sunday voting was a point of disagreement in 15 of the 20 counties whose early-voting plans had been disputed. The Republican-led state board, which now operates under the oversight of Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek after legislators stripped Democratic Gov. Josh Stein of that responsibility, decided to drop Sunday voting this time around in all but two of those 15 counties, Ingram reported.
Boliek had assigned a former N.C. Republican Party executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, to coordinate with local election boards. Woodhouse made it his business to counter Democratic calls to maintain Sunday voting – saying that Saturday voting hours could be increased as a trade-off and that weekend hours would increase on the whole.
He might as well have added, “Souls to the polls? Who needs ’em!” In July he ended up resigning, apparently having followed his mandate from Boliek out the window.
Choosing their voters
Republican efforts to shape and shrink the electorate in their favor have become part of the sound track, so to speak, of recent years. Not to say that Democrats, especially during their era of dominance in the segregated “solid South,” haven’t sometimes done their dishonorable best in the same vein.
In North Carolina, the battle over election rules came to a boil after the GOP gained control of both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office in the elections of 2012. After a fateful U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, so that states with a history of racial voter discrimination no longer needed to have election law changes “pre-cleared” by the U.S. Department of Justice (in retrospect how quaint!), the Republicans in Raleigh were unleashed.
In 2013 they enacted a wide-ranging set of changes, including a photo ID requirement that would have the greatest impact on poorer, older and minority voters, along with eliminating same-day registration during early voting.
Racial justice and voting rights advocates sued in federal court. Their efforts bore fruit in 2016, when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the law. A panel of three judges said that while they weren’t accusing the law’s backers of “racial hatred or animosity,” nevertheless, the “totality of the circumstances…cumulatively and unmistakably reveal” that the legislature’s majority was using the law “to entrench itself.”
“It did so,” the judges declared, “by targeting voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party. Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination.”
It’s predictable that the changes now being imposed by the state elections board will face a similar legal challenge. In 2026, however, we’re forced to rue the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to sustain a claim of race discrimination in the context of partisanship-infused election laws. Racial minorities legally now may be disadvantaged if the purported aim is partisan, even nakedly so. So the needs and aspirations particular to Black voters become collateral damage as Republicans seek to make it harder for Democrats to vote and to have their votes count.
State judges’ role
If relief via the federal courts has been at least to some degree foreclosed, then might small-d democracy defenders look to the state courts to protect access to the polls for every qualified citizen? Well, lots of luck with that.
Our state Supreme Court, with conservatives firmly in control, has given the legislature plenty of leeway to carry out an agenda replete with voter suppression. Perhaps most notably, it green-lighted highly partisan gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts, giving Republicans disproportionate influence. And it has shown no sympathy for Gov. Stein’s complaint that assigning election oversight to the state auditor erodes the governor’s rightful authority.
Now Stein has vetoed a bill that would give the state’s chief justice, currently Republican Paul Newby, unusual power to punish trial-court judges who run afoul of GOP priorities. Yes, some of our independently elected judges have shown the backbone to stand strong for free and fair elections.
House Bill 377 gives the Supreme Court more authority to impose discipline in situations reviewed by the Judicial Standards Commission, which is supposed to oversee judges’ conduct from an ethical standpoint. (The bill’s relevant section starts on page 13, tacked onto a batch of unrelated provisions by a conference committee and thus avoiding regular committee scrutiny.)
When a judge comes under investigation for allegedly serious misconduct (the proceedings are confidential), the chief justice could suspend that judge without pay. The temptation would be to cast a disagreement on the law as an ethical one.
The suspension would last so long as the investigation continued – a period that could extend for months, during which he or she would go unpaid. A judge could be driven off the bench if this authority were abused.
As Stein put it in his Aug. 17 veto message, “Judges should be able to do their jobs without fear that the Chief Justice may deprive them of their livelihood. The small role the bill reserves for the Judicial Standards Commission is cold comfort, given that the Chief Justice and legislative leadership control nearly all of its appointments.”
The governor added some context: “For thirteen years, the General Assembly has repeatedly played politics with the judiciary, including taking all four of the nonpartisan State Bar’s appointments to the Judicial Standards Commission for itself. It needs to stop politicizing our courts. An independent judiciary is critical to protecting the rule of law and the rights of all North Carolinians.” The N.C. Council of Churches, which is fully in accord with the governor on those points as a matter of social justice, hopes to see his veto upheld when and if it’s brought to a vote.
Meanwhile, it can’t escape notice at the Council, whose member denominations include several made up primarily of African-Americans, that cracking down on the popular Sunday-voting option would work against the interests of many North Carolinians who have little political power except what they’re able to wield at the ballot box.
If that issue ever comes before our courts, judges must feel free to help protect the vulnerable despite incipient threats of partisan retaliation – taking lofty constitutional language about our rights as citizens at its word.
