CAROLINA PUBLIC PRESS – A NC A&T student came up to county elections board Democrat Carolyn Bunker in tears after the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ January meeting. The board had just voted 3-2 to exclude two Guilford County college campuses from early voting primary plans.
Unlike many of her fellow students, the student had a car. She told Bunker she felt pressure to drive her friends, her friends’ friends and her classmates to the polls — all while trying to balance schoolwork and a job.
Election boards shouldn’t put that burden on anyone, Bunker told Carolina Public Press. But at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, the largest HBCU in the nation, a group of students are shouldering it proudly.
Juniors Terrence Olu Rouse and Shia Rozier recently launched Protect Ours, a movement to get students from campus to the polls this March.
Since 2004, the NC A&T site has been used for presidential general elections, according to data provided by Guilford County elections director Charlie Collicut. A University of North Carolina – Greensboro site was added in 2012. The county board added both campus sites to presidential primary early voting plans in 2020.
However, neither NC A&T site has ever been used during midterm or municipal election cycles as early voting sites.
Students want that to change. Ideally, they’d like to be on the list for every election, no matter how small, Rouse said.
“This was no goof of the system or administrative error; this is a modern day poll tax on a student,” he said. “There are thousands of students who do not have accessible transportation from campus to polling sites off campus, or students that cannot financially afford it or do not have the time to figure out another means of transportation.”
But it’s too late to change election board members’ minds for this election, so NC A&T students are taking the primary into their own hands. That means tackling the biggest barrier to student voter participation: transportation.
Letting the ‘grown ups’ decide?
Rozier has gone to the county elections board three times in her three years to advocate for the inclusion of NC A&T campus voting sites. This time, she didn’t succeed.
Republican State Board member Stacy “Four” Eggers, for one, doesn’t buy that an urgent need exists to add campus early voting sites in Guilford County. He cites the historical record; in 2022, a majority Democratic county board voted unanimously to approve early voting plans that did not include campus sites.
If there was such a need, Democrats should have included the sites then, he said.
“Now we’re being asked, suddenly, you must add seven sites and double the amount of sites, otherwise you’re discriminating against someone?” Eggers asked.
Guilford County Republican elections chair Eugene Lester is of the same mindset. Campus sites will be open on Election Day, and mail-in absentee voting is available, he said in a December interview with Carolina Public Press. Plenty of options exist, he said, because the board chose 10 sites he thinks serve the entire community.
“We’re certainly not going to look at one group and say that that group is more important than any other group,” Lester added.
Democratic State Board member Siobhan Millen thinks excluding students sends the wrong message.
“What you’ve done, is you’ve said in the primary, the grown ups are going to pick the candidates, and then in the fall, you all can vote or not vote as you want to,” she said. “What my point is, is that I think the primary sites should be as representative as possible and as similar, demographic-wise, to the general so that it’s the same group that’s doing the choosing.”
After the Guilford County portion of the meeting, dozens of NC A&T students stood in front of board members with signs, asking why they weren’t included. In a video of the exchange, one student suggests that if their skin color were different, the outcome would have been too. Republican board chair Francis De Luca firmly rejected that idea.
At the January meeting, the State Board also upheld the Jackson County election board’s majority plan, which cuts a historical Western Carolina University campus early voting site that has been proven to increase youth voter turnout.
Building a movement at NC A&T
Transporting students to the polls won’t be cheap.
Rozier and Rouse are raising funds for a shuttle to take students from campus to the Old County Courthouse, a 1.5-mile journey, for five days of early voting. Each day would cost about $1,500.
As of Monday afternoon, they hadraised $1,370.
In the meantime, they plan to stage a march on Feb. 12 from NC A&T’s Dudley Lawn to the Old County Courthouse. The students are in discussions to partner with several local and statewide organizations in their effort, but were not ready to share a finalized list Monday. Their effort is not connected in any way with the university.
State Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, said NC A&T students have always been engaged in the voting process.
“It’s really commendable how energetic students are about voting, and I think this is a great commentary on that commitment to making sure that their votes are recorded,” she said.
In the longer term, Rozier hopes this is a “turning point” for current and future NC A&T students. They want to work with county boards of election, not against them. They’d like to address and resolve any barriers in the way of placing early voting sites on their campuses so they don’t have to continuously relitigate the issue, she said.
That will be difficult. Early voting decisions often hinge on turnout, which tends to be lower on college campuses. But while those numbers are important, they aren’t everything, Bunker said.
“Students are our future,” she said. “… We have to be cultivating our students into being lifelong voters, and if we don’t provide the sites for them to be able to vote, then we are doing a disservice to our future generation.”
In addition, early voting on college campuses has always been a “partisan battle,” Harrison said. Republicans perceive campus sites as boosting Democratic turnout. It’s also sometimes hard to justify “student-specific” early voting sites that may have difficult parking situations for outsiders, she added.
“But the population centers at these campuses are tremendous, and so from my perspective, it makes sense to locate them there,” Harrison said.
Rozier and Rouse at NC A&T plan to coordinate with other student leaders across the state moving forward — both those who have lost early voting sites and those who want to maintain them.
“We won’t see these different attempts to get college voting to stop anytime soon,” Rozier said. “There is power in strategy, power in community. We hope to build a larger community where we can strategize together about what’s coming next, what we’re doing.”
