Early voting locations in High Point favor Democrats
Steve Arnold brought his complaint about early voting sites to last night's commissioners meeting but was backed up only by his three fellow Republicans. He proposed denying funding for locations except at courthouses and town halls because he views so many of the others as favoring Democrats.
The Board of Elections has set up quite a few polling places around the county for early voting. I can't really assess the political geography in most cases, but I can in regard to the two High Point locations: the Roy Culler Senior Center and Washington Terrace Park.
They're fairly close together, about a mile apart, in the east-central part of the city. Voting in that section of High Point runs heavily Democratic. So Arnold is right, at least when it comes to High Point.
But the same would be true if High Point's early voting sites were the courthouse and city hall. It wouldn't even make sense to use both those facilities because they're within sight of each other.
On the other hand, fair access to early voting locations would call for a site several miles to the north, in the Oak Hollow Lake area, where voting tends to run Republican.
Given the two locations chosen, I'd say early voting in High Point will go the Democrats' way big time.
Addendum: High Point's courthouse has been used for early voting in the past but access is a bit of a problem. The Enterprise quoted Commissioner Bruce Davis, a High Point Democrat as noting the security issue: "because people get strip-searched there and have to go through a metal detector."
Strip searches? Haven't seen that myself, but I guess it might chill early voting on some of these cool October mornings.
Comments (4)
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Bringing up voting locations now smacks not-just-a-little of partisan silliness that we've come to expect from almost all the Commishes (this is Mr. Arnold's latest turn). The early voting locations were approved by a bipartisan panel and have been in place for a while. There are processes to review or change these locations; why doesn't Mr. Arnold follow those procedures instead of going to the media? Could it be that he doesn't really care if it's broken or actually requires fixing but he'd rather make public partisan accusations and nothing more?
Posted on October 3, 2008 10:02 AM
I agree Arnold took the wrong approach this time, but bring attention to the issue might move the board of elections to come up with an additional location in north High Point next time.
Posted on October 3, 2008 12:13 PM
Uh, hello! Oak Hollow Mall is an early voting site too. Its not just Washington Terrace and the Culler center. Anyways, voters arn't assigned to any early voting site. They can voter wherever they want... there's also election day...
Posted on October 4, 2008 12:28 PM
Freddy,
You're right. I overlooked the second list of early voting sites, which does include Oak Hollow Mall. I don't know why there are two different lists, but there are and I missed the second. Apologies to the elections board.
Posted on October 4, 2008 5:47 PM