Our friends at the NC Conservation Network have created a useful (and nifty) interactive map of North Carolina that will point you quickly to your closest early voting site. Click here to view it and use it. Just type in your address in the Search box at the top right, then click Return, NOT the little icon in the Search box. (Check to be sure it has given you a site in your county.) It will tell you where the site is, show it to you on a map, give you driving directions, and let you know the days and hours when that site will be open.
If you don’t like the Search function or if it gives you a site in another county, you can zoom in on your county on the interactive NC map and locate your county’s site(s) in that way. There are also links to a voter hotline and to a nonpartisan voter guide. This looks like a most helpful resource.
In other electoral news, on October 8, the US Supreme Court handed down the final word about voting for this fall’s elections in North Carolina. It upheld the District Court’s decision not to put any of our new voting laws on hold and overturned the Circuit Court’s decision which would have allowed same-day registration during early voting and out-of-precinct provisional voting on Election Day. So we are back to where we started with the voter suppression provisions of H 589 adopted by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor late in last year’s session.
This fall’s decisions have been just on the procedural question of whether the changes in voting laws would be in effect this fall while the changes themselves are being challenged in court. Those substantive challenges are scheduled to be heard in the middle of 2015. Keep in mind, too, that none of this affects the photo ID question. Voters do not have to show a photo ID in order to vote this year.
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