Early voter storm: 1 million vote early so far in N.C.

More than a month ago, N.C. State Board of Elections Director Gary Bartlett warned his senior staff to anticipate a record number of early voters.

They didn’t believe his projections.

“They asked me not to make it public because they didn’t want me to embarrass them. And now it’s happening,” he said.

Although Election Day is still more than a week away, more than one million North Carolinians had voted at one-stop early voting sites by the end of voting Saturday.

Of those, 58 percent were registered Democrats and 25 percent were registered Republicans. Sixteen percent were unaffiliated voters and a marginal number were registered Libertarians.

Roughly 56 percent of the early one-stop voters were female and 33 percent were male. Those numbers do not include the voters who did not designate their gender on either their registration or their ballot.

“If this trend continues, which we expect it to, we may have … as many as 1.8 million to 1.2 million voters voting before Election Day,” Bartlett said.

One-stop voting sites, one of which is located at Morehead Planetarium, allow registered voters to cast their ballots and unregistered voters to register and vote at the same time.

In Orange County, 28,375 voters had voted as of Saturday, according to the county’s board of elections.

North Carolina first offered early voting in the 2000 general election. Eighteen percent of registered voters participated. In 2004, that number increased to 31 percent.

By the end of this election, Bartlett predicts that 35 to 40 percent of total votes cast will be cast early.

Parties and candidates are responsible for generating the growing participation, he said.

N.C. Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek said the party’s grassroots operations — mainly phone banking and targeted mailings — encourage early voting.

“We have more people involved and more resources involved than I think we have ever had, and I think it is paying dividends,” Meek said.

“We’ve got one of the strongest ground operations to get out the vote that we’ve seen probably in our state’s history.”

That early mobilization does not worry Brent Woodcox, spokesman of the N.C. Republican Party.

“If we’re going to reach out to them, and let them know how voting can be convenient for them, then we can increase our turnout higher than we ever have before,” he said.

“What the GOP is trying to do is reach out to infrequent voters who are likely to support our candidates — those folks who might not come out every Election Day.”

He also said the democratic dominance in early voting came as no surprise.

“Barack Obama is spending massive amounts of resources on early voting to bank every vote possible come Election Day,” Woodcox said.

The Republican Party also is phone-banking and sending out mailings as part of its grassroots campaign and has brought John McCain surrogates and GOP representatives to the state to target likely supporters.

“So we don’t think it’s obsolete just yet, and we are still counting on our core voters to come out on Election Day and before,” Woodcox said.

“Come Election Day, we are going to be able to rack up some large totals,” Woodcox said.



Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.