If you work two jobs, or drive a long way to a polling place, or need a relative to drive you, Sunday is often the only day you can vote in person before Election Day. North Carolina counties have offered Sunday early voting hours for years. In Black churches across the state, the tradition even has a name — souls to the polls.

Ten North Carolina counties that had Sunday voting in the last midterm won't have any this November. The Republican majority on the State Board of Elections took them away on August 20, in a run of 3-2 party-line votes.

What happened

The state board met that Thursday to settle early voting plans for 20 counties where the local boards couldn't agree. Most of the disagreements were about the same thing: Democrats on county boards wanted Sunday hours, Republicans didn't.

NC Newsline reported that the state board's Republicans sided with the county GOP majorities in Anson, Chatham, Columbus, Greene, Harnett, Nash, Pasquotank, Pitt, Union, and Wayne — all ten of which opened polls on Sundays four years ago. Lenoir County lost its Sunday hours too. About a dozen more counties had already dropped Sunday voting in plans their boards agreed on unanimously.

The reasons Republicans gave, on the record, were these: Sunday should be for church and family, the hours aren't worth the cost, and Sunday shifts are hard on poll workers.

Matthew Longworth, a Republican on the Anson County board, put it this way at the August 20 meeting:

"By having Sunday voting, we are requiring people to work on the Lord's day. I do believe that the downfall of this country will be contingent on what we do with God."

The cost argument doesn't survive the county's own numbers

Betsy McCormick, a Democrat on the Harnett County board, brought receipts. In 2024, she told the state board, Harnett's early voting sites served 31 voters an hour on weekdays and 32.5 voters an hour on Sundays. Sunday accounted for 8% of early votes cast that year while making up only 5% of the hours the polls were open.

Sunday hours look lightly used for one reason: the polls are only open a few hours on Sundays. Per hour open, they were busier than weekdays.

"Sunday voting hours are a cost effective way to provide a wider range of voters the opportunity to cast their vote," McCormick said.

The phone calls behind the votes

The thing that makes this more than a scheduling fight is who was working the county boards beforehand.

State Auditor Dave Boliek — a Republican — hired Dallas Woodhouse, a longtime political operative and former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, to serve as a liaison to county election boards. In that role, Woodhouse called county board chairs and urged them to drop Sunday hours and establish early voting sites in certain towns.

Jay DeLancy of the Lee County board described one of those calls. He'd assumed the question was settled — Lee County had three hours of Sunday voting and he didn't think it could be taken away. Then Woodhouse brought up the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision, which sharply weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, and, in DeLancy's account, "suggested that we add two hours on Saturdays and get rid of Sundays."

Woodhouse resigned in July. Siobhan Millen, a Democrat on the state board, told the meeting what everyone in the room could see:

"Even though Mr. Woodhouse resigned last month, his fingerprints are all over these plans. They want to tailor who votes by tweaking the sites and the hours."

Woodhouse, still promoting the plans on X after leaving the job, called the outcome "a proud day for North Carolina voters."

Pressure, and a threat

The Jackson County board — home to Western Carolina University — became the clearest example. Its Republican members said publicly this year that they were under "pressure from Raleigh" not to approve an early voting site on the university campus.

One of them, Jay Pavey, voted with the Democrats for the campus site anyway. He said he was threatened with removal from the board for it. Public records later showed Boliek's office worked to delay the county's vote and instructed the board's chair to "stand strong" against the campus site.

Pavey came to the state board meeting and warned his own party's members that if they approved a plan "obtained through pressure and obtained through coercion, you're going to hurt our party."

The state board voted unanimously to include the campus site.

In Granville County, the Republican plan would have closed one of the county's most-used early voting sites and moved another out of downtown Oxford. Those were the sites Black voters used most. Board member Jeff Carmon asked the obvious question: "If they've said that area is heavily populated with Black and brown individuals, how can we say it does not disproportionately impact them?" The board's compromise kept the library site open but still moved the downtown Oxford site to a convention center outside downtown.

How Republicans got the majority in the first place

None of these votes would exist without a 2024 state law that stripped the power to appoint the State Board of Elections from incoming Democratic Governor Josh Stein and handed it to Boliek, the Republican auditor. It flipped the board from a Democratic to a Republican majority, and it lets Boliek appoint the chairs of the county boards too. Stein and Roy Cooper, then the governor, sued. The state Supreme Court let the law take effect while the appeal proceeds.

That is the machinery. Change who appoints the referees, then change the hours.

It is not just North Carolina

The pattern is national, and we have tracked it through the year:

• Trump's Medicare agency rewrote its guidance to nursing homes, replacing instructions to help 1.2 million residents vote with warnings about fraud liability.
• In Texas, a county switched its map after the primary, two months after the Callais ruling Woodhouse cited narrowed the Voting Rights Act.
• Byron Donalds won't back the state voting rights bill named for two Florida organizers killed by a bomb.

Each move is small on its own. That is the design. Nobody announces that fewer people should vote. They shorten the hours, move the site, and let the arithmetic do the rest.

What the record shows

Republicans on the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 3-2, along party lines, to eliminate Sunday early voting in ten counties that offered it in 2022. An eleventh, Lenoir, lost its Sunday hours because its deadlocked board sent up two plans and neither one included them. A former state Republican Party executive director, hired by the Republican state auditor as a liaison to county boards, had been calling county chairs to urge exactly that, and one Republican county member says he was threatened with removal for approving a college campus voting site. Harnett County's own figures show Sunday hours drew more voters per hour than weekdays.

Source

Lynn Bonner, "Republicans on the NC elections board agree to drop Sunday early voting hours in 10 more counties" and "NC Board of Elections votes along party lines to reject most Sunday early voting hours", NC Newsline, August 20–21, 2026. Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline.