Take time for Sailor Jones’ opinion as director of Common Cause NC about the state of voting in NC and Rowan County. Use the links to refresh your memory and better understand the implications.

Salisbury Post – 8/4/26

On Aug. 20, the North Carolina State Board of Elections will decide early voting plans for counties where bipartisan local elections boards couldn’t unanimously agree on options for the 2026 general election.

Rowan County is one of them.

Rowan County joins at least 19 North Carolina counties that have handed the fate of the most popular way residents vote to a five-member state board chosen by Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek, who used his position to pressure county boards to pick early voting sites that would boost GOP turnout.

If you care about voting options that work for all voters in your county, Boliek’s state board in Raleigh is not the one you want making the picks.

The board is dominated by an uncompromising Republican majority and chaired by one of the state’s worst elections deniers. GOP members have pushed for policies that could toss ballots along party lines, refused to discipline those proven to meddle in election options, balked at community requests for Sunday and campus voting, and ignored multiple ethics complaints to keep their friends on local elections boards.

The State Board of Elections’ August early voting meeting will cap months of problematic local processes that could now affect at minimum 1.8 million voters’ ability to cast a ballot in counties with non-unanimous early voting plans, including over 100,000 registered voters in Rowan.

The Rowan County Board of Elections’ process for picking two competing early voting plans — one with more options, one with fewer — reveals a troubling lack of transparency seen in too many counties this year.

Despite Rowan voters’ clear interest in having input in the early voting plans, the Rowan Elections board chair made little effort to share what plans would be considered, instead requiring voters to contact local staff in order to find out when and what was being proposed.

Even when Rowan voters did reach out to local officials, some local voters shared they were refused access to proposals in advance of the last public meeting to discuss them.

While the law requires county boards act in “good faith” to provide for “the public’s knowledge and participation in its meetings,” the agenda for the Rowan board’s July 8 special meeting did not provide the public with a copy of the plan to be voted on, just an agenda item of “Early Voting Plan for 2026 General Midterm Election.” This was despite the fact that the Rowan Elections director acknowledged that the board had agreed upon a plan in advance of the meeting, suggesting that important discussions on voters’ options had been happening outside of open meeting rules.

The meeting itself added to the public’s confusion, with the Rowan board chair refusing to allow meaningful discussion and the GOP majority voting to approve a plan that was never described in advance, even, it seemed, to other board members.

To make matters worse, the county board provided no opportunity for public comment during its July 8 meeting to inform their final votes, with the chair refusing relevant questions from fellow board members and community alike. It was as if the decisions about Rowan’s early voting plan had already been handed down from Raleigh.

The whole questionable affair in Rowan, like contentious meetings in so many counties this year, should remind North Carolinians of another failed process that has shaped our elections in recent years: the one used by state lawmakers to ram through gerrymandered voting districts so often over the past decade.

Time and time again, the General Assembly’s majority party hosted abbreviated redistricting hearings, announced with little public notice nor regard for public comment. The bad maps were foregone conclusions, clearly shaped by conspiratorial conversations that happened by a few people in power outside of the public eye and in violation of the law.

Then and now, a poor process impacts our freedom to vote in fair elections. Like legislative leaders’ efforts to crack districts and pack voters for political gain, majorities on county elections boards like the one in Rowan want to “pack” voters into fewer or different early voting sites and “crack” early voting hours, eliminating certain voting days like Sundays to favor their party.

But this murky process of “gerrymandering” early voting plans wasn’t something county officials learned only from state lawmakers.

Auditor Dave Boliek also stands ready to violate the law rather than turn over public records that could show the extent to which his office made moves behind the scenes to get early voting plans that would protect Republicans.

Regardless of how state and local officials try to hide details of their early voting decision-making, as with gerrymandering, it’s all voters who pay the price.

Sailor Jones is state director for Common Cause NC.