RALEIGH, N.C. — Early voting for the Tuesday, Oct. 6 elections begins Thursday for some area counties.

In Wake County, voters will be choosing for Board of Education Districts 1, 2, 7, and 9; Raleigh Municipal; and Cary Municipal elections.

In addition, any Wake County resident who did not register or update their voter registration information by the Sept. 11, 2009, voter registration deadline, may do so while voting early at either of the early voting sites listed below.

Wake Early Voting Locations and Hours

Wake County Board of Elections
337 S. Salisbury St., Raleigh
Thursday, Sept. 17-Friday, Oct. 2 Weekdays from 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday, Oct. 3 from  10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Herbert C. Young Community Center
101 Wilkinson Ave., Cary
Wednesday, September 30 – Friday, Oct. 2 from 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday, October 3  10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Chatham County voters who live in Cary can also participate in early voting starting Thursday:

Vote early at the Pittsboro One Stop site: The Pittsboro site will be open beginning on Sept. 17 and ending on October 3rd. The hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and Thursday from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. This site will also be open on Saturday, Oct. 3, from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.

Vote early at the Cary One Stop site: The One Stop Site in Cary will be at the Herbert C. Young Community Center and will be open from 11 am until 7 pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, September 30th, Oct. 1, and Oct. 2 and will be open from 10 am until 1 p.m. on Oct. 3.

Vote on Election Day: The East Williams precinct polling place at New Hope Baptist Church, located at 581 New Hope Church Road in Apex will be open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 6.

Durham County Early-Voting information
Durham voters can vote early at the Durham Elections office 706 W. Corporation St, Durham between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays through Oct. 2.

In addition, they can vote at these times:

Saturday, Sept. 26 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 27 from noon to 3 p.m.
Saturday, Oct. 03 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

By Wesley Young
Media General News Service

Voter participation increased in 2008 among whites, blacks and Hispanics in North Carolina compared with 2004, a new Census Bureau survey about the presidential election shows.

Chalk it up to North Carolina’s status as a “state in play” during the 2008 general election, said Ferrel Guillory, an election analyst.

“The Democratic campaign poured a lot of resources into the state, in television commercials and a get-out-the-vote effort,” said Guillory, who is the director of the Program on Public Life at the UNC Center for the
Study of the American South. “That activity generated a high turnout, mostly on the Democratic side.”

“You had a higher turnout, particularly among black voters who found themselves with an opportunity to make history,” he said.

North Carolina had a 95 percent turnout among black registered voters and 88 percent among registered white voters.

The turnout numbers for North Carolina were quite different than the numbers for the United States as a whole.

Nationally, the share of eligible voters who cast ballots in November declined for the first time in several years. The reason: Older whites with little interest in backing either Barack Obama or John McCain stayed home.

Census figures released Monday show about 63.6 percent of all U.S. citizens ages 18 and older, or 131.1 million people, voted last November.

Although that represented an increase of 5 million voters — virtually all of them minorities — the turnout relative to the population of eligible voters was a decrease from 63.8 percent in 2004.

Ohio and Pennsylvania were among those showing declines in white voters, helping Obama carry those battleground states.

“While the significance of minority votes for Obama is clearly key, it cannot be overlooked that reduced white support for a Republican candidate allowed minorities to tip the balance in many slow-growing ‘purple’ states,” said William H. Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution, referring to key battleground states that do not notably tilt Democrat or Republican.

“The question I would ask is if a continuing stagnating economy could change that,” he said.
Where North Carolina has been colored Republican red in every presidential election since 1976, the
Democratic presidential ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden carried the state by about 14,000 votes last year.

The Census Bureau figures are estimates based on a survey sample and are subject to margins of error that vary depending on the group measured.

The Census Bureau reported that nationwide the number of black voters increased by 2 million, as did the number of Hispanic voters. The number of non-Hispanic white voters was about the same as in 2004.

All three ethnic groups showed increased voter participation in North Carolina, the survey said. About 68 percent of the white population voted in 2008, compared with 61.5 percent in 2004. Among blacks older than 18, about 67 percent said they voted in 2008, compared with 63 percent in 2004.

Hispanic voter participation grew from eight percent to 21 percent, but the survey found that 65 percent of North Carolina’s Hispanics with citizenship cast ballots in 2008.

Although the Census Bureau figures do not show it, Guillory said, younger voters overwhelmingly favored Obama.

“The third thing is that if you look at the numbers by county, you see Obama did especially well in the state’s major metropolitan areas,” he said.

Although a breakdown by race and age was not available on the state level, the Census Bureau figures showed that a smaller percentage of North Carolina voters between 65 and 74 voted in 2008 compared with 2004.

“The internal dynamics shifted just enough to give the Democrats victory in 2008 but we remain a high competitive state,” Guillory said.

“What the Census Bureau numbers help show is that when you have a competitive election and voters feel that a lot is at stake they will come out to vote.”

(The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3/17/09, Editorial)

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on a North Carolina redistricting case might not have a huge practical impact. The “cross-over district” at issue is not common. But the case is helpful in highlighting one of the enduring divisions in American politics.

The court ruled that the Voting Rights Act does not require creating “safe” seats for minority candidates in districts where minorities make up less than half the voting populace. This, according to another newspaper, overturns a “central goal” of the Voting Rights Act — “protecting minority voting rights.”

But that is utter nonsense. Nothing in the case suggested that minorities were being deprived of the right to vote. They were not kept away from the polls, intimidated, harassed with poll taxes or literacy tests, or otherwise importuned.

The only thing the ruling might be said to do is to reduce, slightly, the odds that a minority might win a particular seat, in the same way that failing to require the political gerrymandering of a legislative district might reduce the odds that an incumbent or a member of a given party might win a particular seat.

To put it another way, the court refused to say that the Voting Rights Act requires states to guarantee political outcomes. But it did nothing to limit opportunities.

The only way the court ruling could be said to interfere with voting rights is if the right to vote is synonymous with the right to have your candidate win. Even then, the argument is predicated on the increasingly outdated notion that minorities automatically prefer candidates who share their skin color, and that white Americans will not vote for a person of ethnic origin. That would come as a surprise to, e.g., Barack Obama.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has ruled that electoral districts must have a majority of African-Americans or other minorities to be protected by a provision of the Voting Rights Act.
     
Read the full story

Democratic candidates scored big during the 17 days of early voting, but Republican voters made up for it on Nov. 4, according to an election research group.

Wake County Board of Elections (BOE) reported that 251,332 citizens participated in the early voting process, of which 10,778 registered and voted on the same day.

Wake County easily surpassed its initial goal of accommodating 200,000 early voters. More people voted during the early voting period than on Election Day, when 168,060 residents came out to vote.

Absentee Ballots
The BOE mailed out over 27,000 requested absentee ballots and received back 22,553 completed ballots.

Provisional Ballots
Wake County had 4,025 provisional ballots cast in 2008 (of those, 2,068 were qualified Wake County voters whose ballots were counted), in comparison to more than 13,000 cast in 2004 (of those, 10,915 were qualified ballots). There were less provisional ballots cast due to a change in the law, allowing voters to update their addresses at early voting sites. A pilot program in Wake County allowed every precinct to have a laptop, which verified voter eligibility and voting locations.

Wake County’s BOE certified the Presidential Election on Friday, November 14, 2008, at 11 a.m. It marked the first time the County has not conducted a countywide recount after an election in about 18 years. Even with the election over, BOE staff still has to sort one-stop (early ballots), absentee by mail ballots and provisional ballots (nearly 275,000) into 198 precincts.

High Voter Turnout
In total, 444,013 people voted in Wake County for the General Election, which means that Wake County had a 75 percent voter turn out.

The State Board will certify the statewide election on Tuesday, November 25, 2008. It does not appear as if a statewide recount will be needed.

RALEIGH, N.C.  – Barack Obama’s effort to register tens of thousands of voters this summer was widely successful.

But the president-elect may not have won North Carolina without the help of a new law that allowed voters to both sign up and cast a ballot during state’s early voting period.

Obama became the first Democrat to win North Carolina in more than three decades. The unofficial margin without the tally of provisional ballot stands at 13,692 votes over Republican nominee John McCain.

Nearly 92,000 new voters registered during the early voting period, which opened after the traditional registration deadline for Election Day voting had passed. Democrats outregistered Republicans at the early voting sites by a margin of more than two-to-one.

RALEIGH, N.C. – The long waits that plagued early voting in North Carolina haven’t turned up on Election Day.

Several counties reported some lines of a few dozen people when polls opened Tuesday morning. But they quickly abated as sites processed those pre-workday voters. North Carolina’s largest counties reported little or no waits at polling sites throughout much of the day, and some precincts only had a trickle of voters coming to cast a ballot.

The overwhelming turnout that sustained through the early voting period that ended Saturday processed some 2.6 million voters. Because of that, elections officials expected about 2 million people to vote Tuesday.

State Board of Elections director Gary Bartlett now says the turnout will fall below his earlier guess.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Voters in central and eastern North Carolina will be in the rain as they go to the polls on Election Day, though forecasters don’t expect heavy rainfall.

National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Beaman said Tuesday that mountain communities should expect to see clouds breakup in the afternoon.

Beaman said light but steady rain will be heaviest in central North Carolina but downpours aren’t expected.

More rainfall is expected along the coast by Tuesday evening as a low pressure system off the coast moves inland and mixes with cooler air.
 
By Wednesday, Beaman said rain is expected only in the northeastern part of the state.