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Early voting starts today in Fletcher, Etowah and Edneyville

By Amy McCraw, Published: October 25, 2024

Early voting opportunities will expand this week after the Henderson County Board of Elections, bending to the will of the N.C. Legislature, voted to add sites in Fletcher, Etowah and Edneyville.

“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 force Henderson and other counties to add voting sites. “We have a system that is working. Why mess with it?”
During a special called meeting of the board last week, Eddleman also questioned whether there might have been ulterior motives in state lawmakers’ decision to pass a bill last week that requires mountain counties devastated by Hurricane Helene to operate at least one early voting site for every 30,000 registered voters. He added that he does not intend to serve another term as chairman of the election’s board once his current term expires next summer.
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 ordered county boards of election in the 13 most impacted counties from Hurricane Helene to open at least one early voting site for every 30,000 registered voters in their county. All but two counties already met that threshold; Henderson and McDowell counties were the only ones that did not. Henderson County has more than 92,000 registered voters and, until this week, had only one early voting site.

County boards of elections are made up of two Democrats and two Republicans recommended by county party committees and appointed by the state Board of Elections. The chair is appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
Eddleman suggested the board meet the bill’s requirement to expand early voting by opening early voting sites in Fletcher, Flat Rock and Etowah, three locations previously used in primary and general elections.
But Republican board member Debbie Dante said the Justice Academy in Edneyville would be a better location for early voting than Flat Rock Village Hall because Flat Rock is close to the voting site at the Board of Elections. A site in Edneyville near Bat Cave and Gerton, where the hurricane hit hard, would also be a good idea, she added.
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.

Bat Cave, Gerton folks 'want to vote on Election Day'

Earlier this month the Board of Elections moved the Bat Cave polling location from the Bat Cave Fire Department to the Justice Academy and to Gerton Fire Department at 4975 Gerton Highway. 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 the staff would handle additional early voting sites, Heatherly said she did not plan to shift resources from the current location at the Board of Elections to the new ones.
“We will be doing the bare minimum” at the three new sites, she said. “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, a Democrat, also criticized the legislature’s move to override county boards' authority.

“What does this say about us here?” she 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 has strained the elections board staff.
“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 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, a Republican, also agreed that the Board of Elections site is well run but said state lawmakers may 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 to expand voting.
“It’s optics, I think,” Rebuck said.

RNC weighs in on 'blatant election interference'

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.

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Carolina Public Press contributed to this report.