News

Early voting to begin in Fletcher, Etowah and Edneyville

By Amy McCraw, Published: October 25, 2024

Henderson County’s Board of Elections on Friday voted to create additional early voting locations in Fletcher, Etowah and Edneyville after the N.C. Legislature passed a bill that forced the expansion of early voting in the county.

“Personally, I am very disturbed about this. I find it absolutely reprehensible,” Clay Eddleman, the chairman of the county’s Board of Elections, said of the legislature’s decision to require the expansion of early voting in Henderson County and certain other counties impacted by Hurricane Helene. “We have a system that is working. Why mess with it?”
Eddleman also questioned whether there might have been ulterior motives in state lawmakers’ decision to pass a bill on Thursday that requires certain counties to operate at least one early voting site for every 30,000 registered voters. He said he does not intend to serve another term as chairman of the election’s board once his current term expires over the summer.
In addition to Henderson County, the law applies to several other Western North Carolina counties including Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey.
The General Assembly passed Senate Bill 132, titled "An Act to Require or Authorize the Addition of Early Voting Sites in Certain Counties for the November 2024 Election," on Thursday afternoon.
The bill, sponsored by Henderson County state Sen. Tim Moffitt, requires that no later than Tuesday, Oct. 29, and through Saturday, Nov. 2, the counties named in the bill provide at least one early voting site for every 30,000 registered voters.
Eddleman called for Friday’s emergency Board of Elections meeting shortly after the bill passed.
Representatives from both political parties and the county’s League of Women Voters also attended the meeting that at times became tense.
Eddleman suggested the board meet the bill’s requirement to expand early voting by opening early voting sites in Fletcher, Flat Rock and Etowah. Those locations were previously used as early voting sites before the board decided this year to reduce the number of early voting sites from four to one.
But Board Member Debbie Dante said she thought the Justice Academy in Edneyville would be a better location for early voting than the site in Flat Rock because Flat Rock is close to the voting site at the Board of Elections. A location in Edneyville near Bat Cave and Gerton where the hurricane hit hard would also be a good idea, she said.
After a split vote on moving the Flat Rock site to Edneyville, the board voted unanimously to make the Justice Academy in Edneyville an early voting location.
Earlier this month the Board of Elections also passed a resolution to move the Bat Cave polling location from the Bat Cave Fire Department to the Justice Academy off U.S. 64 and to Gerton Fire Dept at 4975 Gerton Hwy. The move was made because of the damage caused by Hurricane Helene to the Bat Cave Fire Department.
Summer Heatherly, the county’s elections director, said emergency responders in Bat Cave and Gerton have a plan to get everyone in those areas to the polls on election day.
“They want to vote on election day,” she said. “They don’t want to vote early. They want to wait until election day because that’s what they want to do.”
In response to a board member’s question about how elections workers will accomplish opening additional voting sites, Heatherly said she does not plan to pull resources from the current location at the Board of Elections to the sites added on Friday.
“We will be doing the bare minimum,” she said of the additional sites. “Will there be lines? Yes.”
But she said the short wait at the Board of Elections will not change because no people or machines will be moved to the other locations.
“It’s not going to do anything here,” she said.
Board Member Sharon Pearson also called the legislature’s decision to require more early voting sites reprehensible and said the decision undermined the hard work of Heatherly and other workers at the Board of Elections.
“What does this say about us here?” Pearson said. Heatherly “put this whole thing together. How can they come in and just sort of cut her off at the knees? What does it say about us as a board?”
Heatherly said the controversy over early voting sites has been difficult for her and her team.
“It has hurt my team because they have worked so hard to make sure every voter has the chance to vote,” she said.
Eddleman and Heatherly said voting at the Board of Elections has been successful with more than 24,000 voters casting their ballots at the location as of Thursday.
Dante said her suggestion to have early voting at the Justice Academy was not about the efficiency of the current location. She said she only wanted to reach out to more voters.
Board Member Linda Rebuck said she also agreed that the Board of Elections site is well run. But she said she thought state lawmakers might have thought they were being ignored when Henderson County reduced the number of early voting sites after the legislature gave counties impacted by the hurricane more options for early voting.
“It’s optics, I think,” she said.
The Legislature's action to require more early voting locations in Henderson County came after the county Board of Elections reduced early voting sites from four in previous elections to one this year, drawing criticism from both political parties and some voters.
Voters who turned out for the first day of early voting in Henderson County on Oct. 17 found traffic congestion at the county’s only early voting site at the Board of Elections off Spartanburg Highway. Some voters also said they were unaware of the reduction in voting sites this year and arrived at previous early voting locations to find them empty.
Both political parties slammed the decision to reduce the number of early voting sites.
Bruce Macdonald, an attorney for the Henderson County Democratic Party, first raised the alarm about the reduction in voting sites on Sept. 21, a week before Hurricane Helene.
“At a time when voter suppression is often subtle, but many times not so subtle, and with an upcoming election that is more consequential than perhaps any we have seen, it is hard to understand why the Henderson County Board of Elections made this decision,” Macdonald said in an email. “With a county this large and a population of 119,000, you maintain or increase — not eliminate — early-voting sites.”
RNC Chairman Michael Whatley, the former chair of the N.C. GOP, issued a statement that blamed the decision on Democrats, even though the two Republicans on the county Elections Board voted in favor of the change.
“This blatant election interference by North Carolina Democrats will not be tolerated, and we are demanding they expand voting sites immediately,” he said. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the county should be adding voting sites, not eliminating them, the RNC said on Oct. 17.