Seek Common Sense On Early Voting

By John Hood

RALEIGH — When I began covering politics in the late 1980s, Labor Day unofficially signaled the “homestretch” of election campaigns. After winning their party’s nomination in late-spring primaries, candidates would spend the summer raising money, building organizations, and preparing for forums, interviews, and rallies during September and October.

Today’s political cycles are longer and flatter. In our state, we now hold primaries in March. Both candidates and independent-expenditure groups begin laying the groundwork for their general-election campaigns much earlier. Many run broadcast, digital, and earned media during spring or summer, when inventory is more plentiful, in order to introduce themselves to voters or, more often, to define their opponents as unflatteringly as possible.

Early September remains a pivot point, however, because it launches the voting process itself. On September 4, elections officials begin sending out absentee ballots to those requesting them. To vote on Election Day, voters must be registered by October 9. Six days later, early-voting sites open around the state. Absentee-ballot requests must be in by October 20, with early voting ending on Halloween (presumably a coincidence). Election Day is November 3.

Around Labor Day, North Carolinians will read, hear, or see copious commentary about early voting. Campaigns, parties, and interested groups will beg their supporters to do it. Advocates of the option will complain that the Republican appointees now in charge of elections administration have “suppressed the vote” by opening too few sites in too few places. Skeptics will argue that, despite the change in partisan control of elections board, the location of early-voting sites remain skewed in favor of Democratic-leaning voters.

And I will restate my own views on the matter, which mirror my views on voter ID: partisans on both sides are grossly exaggerating how much it matters.

Voting before Election Day has become a popular option. Most North Carolinians now do it, either in person or by absentee ballot. But has it fundamentally changed how many citizens vote or shape electoral outcomes? I used to say the evidence for such effects was surprisingly weak. No longer. The modifier is out of date. After many years of early voting, and dozens of careful studies of its effects, there is no surprise. Early voting has no consistent effects on turnout. A few studies find increases. Most show either no appreciable effect or decreases in voter participation.

A 2025 paper in the Journal of Urban Affairs, for example, found that early voting for municipal elections in Ohio depressed turnout. A 2026 paper found similar effects across a broader set of local elections. A 2018 paper in the journal Political Behavior looked specifically at our state and found “little evidence that changes to early opportunities in North Carolina had uniform effects on voter turnout.”

My John Locke Foundation colleague Andy Jackson recently characterized the empirical evidence as busting two myths — that early voting boosts turnout and that early voting systematically favors Democratic candidates. But he concludes, and I agree, that these findings don’t constitute a persuasive argument for abolishing the option. North Carolinians like early voting! They see it as a convenience, or a safeguard in case they get sick or end up out of town on Election Day, or a way of getting their names scratched off campaign lists so they won’t get countless texts, calls, or emails urging them to vote.

In an attempt to bring our seemingly interminable political and legal wars over early voting to a conclusion, Jackson proposed a compromise: reduce the number of early-voting days from 17 to 10 but ensure that one of those days is a Sunday. In addition to saving money, a somewhat-shortened voting period would also protect against casting an early ballot that subsequent news coverage might cause a voter to regret. “While we will likely never have broad agreement on the ideal number of early voting days,” Jackson wrote, “this proposal will maintain voter convenience and conserve local government resources.”

Common sense. Perhaps too much to ask for.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).