When students Tatiana James and Khadijah Barry voted in an election for the first time last year, they cast ballots on their own campus.
The juniors, who are studying criminal justice and political science at NC A&T State University, said they were grateful their campus had an early-voting site. When they found out it wouldn’t return for the mid-term primaries next year, they were shocked.
“Having an early-voting site on campus or near campus is important for the student body,” Barry said. “A&T is huge. Students make up a good bit of Greensboro.”
In mid-November, the Guilford County Board of Elections approved its plan for early-voting sites for the 2026 midterm primary elections. In a 3-2, party-line vote, the board’s Republican majority approved 10 locations for early-voting in February—none at either A&T or UNC-Greensboro.
Dozens protested the move at the meeting, James and Barry among them.
“We’re putting an emphasis on the accessibility for all students and all residents—temporary or permanent in Greensboro—being able to vote,” James said.
Since the board’s vote, students have been pushing to get the two campuses included in the plan, which now goes to the North Carolina State Board of Elections for a final vote.
UNCG senior Xaviar Rodriguez Nail believes the exclusion of the campus sites is racial discrimination.
“It’s a historical thing,” Nail said. “The government is always targeting minority areas or Black areas where the Black population is the highest.”
The argument over using universities for early-voting is not new—and not unique to Guilford County. But voting experts say their inclusion is good for voter engagement and turnout. Conservatives argue the sites, used by younger and minority voters, disproportionately serve Democrats.
As conversations around elections and voting access become increasingly partisan, college students in Greensboro are stuck in the middle, advocating for themselves and others who they say are often overlooked.
Looking to the Past
Two competing voting plans will go before the state board of elections, which will likely make its decision in early January. The board can approve either or create a new plan for Guilford County, per state law.
The Republicans on the Guilford County board—Eugene Lester, Kathryn Lindley, and Peter Francis O’Connell —chose 10 sites after looking at past voter turnout numbers.
Those sites are: High Point’s Deep River Recreation Center and the Roy Culler Senior Center. In Greensboro, the plan includes the old Guilford County Courthouse downtown, Barber Park, Leonard Recreation Center, Bur-Mil Club, Craft Recreation Center, Lewis Recreation Center, the Guilford Cooperative Extension, also known as the “Ag Center,” and Brown Recreation Center.
The board’s Democrats—Carolyn Bunker and Felita Donnell—put forth a competing plan, which adds five more locations, including NC A&T State University and UNCG.
Republicans on the board say they aren’t doing anything new. While sites at A&T and UNCG have been used for both early and election day voting in presidential elections, neither has ever been used in midterms.
Lester, who chairs the board, has served on it since 2019. The board makes its determination based on which precincts perform well, he said, as well as whether the facilities are appropriate and if there is enough parking.
Historically, both UNCG and A&T are lower-performing locations when used in presidential elections, Lester said.
“If you have a site that hits 2,000 people versus a site that’s only getting a few hundred, you tend to gravitate towards the higher-performing sites,” he said.
The two university sites ranked at the bottom of the 17 total sites, accounting for just 4.2 percent of total votes cast, according to Guilford County Board of Elections data
In the last general election, 6,800 votes were cast at UNCG, and 6,487 votes were cast at A&T. The campuses ranked about midway through the 28 total sites, just above the Greensboro Coliseum and Summerfield Community Center in turnout. That’s roughly where they ranked for the primary and general elections in 2020.
Voter turnout plays a role in which sites are included, said Charlie Colicutt, director of elections for Guilford County. So does cost. That includes delivery truck rental, delivery of equipment like laptops, printers, and voting machines, as well as staffing. The average cost to run a single early-voting site during midterm elections is about $27,500 for staffing alone, Colicutt said.
“You could make a future argument that when you’re looking at administrative needs, do you see the sites as not having as much of bang for your buck for that election?” Colicutt said. “Voting members of the board could make that argument.”
The board increased the number of early-voting sites for the coming year by two locations compared to years past, said Lindley, another Republican on the board.
“For the last 12 years, we used eight sites,” she said. “We added two additional to better take care of the population concentrations and to make sure we had the entire county covered.”
Both Lindley and Lester pointed to the Guilford Cooperative Extension and the old Guilford County Courthouse as locations near both campuses where students can vote early.
“I know that several of the students have walked to their closest early-voting sites, which are not that far away,” Lindley said.
Students can also use the bus system that runs through their campuses or rely on friends and family to take them to vote, she said.
“It’s somewhat of a privilege,” Lester said, echoing comments that caused controversy at the November meeting. “You’ve got to think it through and plan ahead. But people should definitely go vote.”
But students advocating for using A&T and UNCG for early voting said that’s not always so easy. Students typically have busy schedules. Some don’t have cars on campus, and transportation can be an issue, they said.
Some voting experts have found that early-voting sites on college campuses increase turnout and create lifelong voters.
“I think there’s a lack of appreciation of what on-campus polling locations can offer college communities,” said Yael Bromberg, a voting-rights expert. “This is part of a larger picture.”
‘It Shouldn’t Take an Uber to Go Vote’
Bromberg, who teaches at American University Washington College of Law, has studied youth voting rights for decades.
In 2019, she conducted a study of nearly 60 campuses and found that schools with early voting and election day polling locations increased turnout by 7.39 percentage points.
“This is not a small number,” Bromberg said. “This is actually hugely significant in terms of youth voter engagement.”
Even if the campuses have lower turnout compared to other sites during certain elections, Bromberg said, on-campus sites should still be available.
“The idea that there should be a penalty that you now make it even harder is not an appropriate response,” she said.
“I think there’s a lack of appreciation of what on-campus polling locations can offer college communities. This is part of a larger picture.”
Yael Bromberg, voting rights expert
Young voters have unique circumstances that can make it harder to access voting, Bromberg said.“It shouldn’t take an Uber to go vote,” Barry said.
Having early voting on campus makes a difference, said Nail, the UNCG senior.
“It’s not enough to just have it on election day,” he said. “It doesn’t give us enough time for us to get there. Students are busy, we have tests, classes to attend, families to go home to.”
If students can’t make it to the polls in person, Republicans on the Guilford board said, students can request absentee ballots and vote by mail.
But that shouldn’t be the default, Bromberg said. She pointed to comments members of Congress made when the 26th Amendment—which lowered the national voting age from 21 to 18—was ratified.
“[F]orcing young voters to undertake special burdens-obtaining absentee ballots, or traveling to one centralized location in each city, for example-in order to exercise their right to vote might well serve to dissuade them from participating in the election,” Congress said in a joint resolution at the time.
The early-voting period is important, Bromberg said. In North Carolina, voters can do same-day registration. That option is not available on Election Day.
“What that results in is an outside reliance on provisional ballots,” Bromberg said. “It causes a significant amount of confusion.”
Provisional ballots cast by North Carolina university students were often rejected at higher rates than the state average, according to a 2022 study in the Rutgers University Law Review by Duke professor Gunther Peck.
“Rather than serving as a failsafe that protects the voting rights of young citizens, provisional ballots seem to be hindering young citizens’ constitutionally protected rights to vote,” the study’s authors wrote.
A portion of the study analyzed data from voters at N.C. Central University, one of the state’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
“There’s a lack of appreciation that young people constitute a constitutionally protected class of voters,” Bromberg said. “And then when talking about HBCUs, and you’re talking about Black youth, now you have two classes of constitutionally protected voters.”
As the largest HBCU in the country, Bromberg said, it would be a shame not to include A&T as an early-voting site.
But some local conservatives argue that A&T’s majority-Black population would “disproportionally favor” Democrats.
“It’s not just skewed, it’s very skewed,” said Chris Meadows, the chair of the Guilford County Republican Party.
The Broader Political Landscape
After Democrat Josh Stein won the gubernatorial race in 2024, Republican lawmakers transferred the governor’s power to appoint election boards to the state auditor, a Republican. Since then, the state and county’s election boards have flipped from Democratic majorities to 3-2 splits favoring Republicans.
Carolyn Wilson Bunker, one of the two Democrats on the Guilford County Board of Elections, voted with Republicans on eight early voting sites in 2022. The plan included neither UNCG nor A&T and passed unanimously.
Bunker said her chief concern during the pandemic was being sure voting sites had enough room for everyone to socially distance. But this year is different, she said.
“I was very concerned that the Republicans were not going to allow sites that would be equitable for all of Guilford County,” she said.
During the November meeting, Bunker proposed a competing plan, which included five additional sites, including UNCG and A&T, on top of the 10 proposed by Republicans.
“We need to support all of our voters, and that includes our students,” she said. “If we can get young voters to vote two to three times, we know they will turn into lifelong voters. For our democracy, we need young voters.”
“Both college campuses show the strongest party imbalances in the county,” Meadows said, who leads the Guilford County Republican Party.
Meadows cites a 2024 analysis by Verity Vote in defending the board’s early voting site decisions. Verity Vote is a right-wing political organization founded by Heather Honey, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to an “election integrity” role within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Multiple news reports have described Honey as an election conspiracist who attempted to use misinformation to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Meadows argues that a state statute highlighted in Verity Votes analysis spells out the rules for early voting, that chosen sites “will not disproportionately favor any party, racial or ethnic group, or candidate.”
Collicut, director of elections for Guilford County, says that is a misreading of the statute and that it only applies to non-public buildings. Siobhan O’Duffy Millen, a Democrat on the state board of elections, agrees that Meadows’ and Verity Vote’s interpretation of the state statute is incorrect.
“We’re very well aware of what the statute says,” Millen said. “It doesn’t say every individual site within the county has to be a breakdown of the county…. You have to take the county as a whole.”
Looking at each site for balance doesn’t make sense, Millen said.
“There are going to be outlying areas that vote Republican, and there will be some in cities that vote Democratic,” she said. “The job of the board is to make it as balanced as possible.”
Other areas in the community, like retirement homes, don’t have voting sites where they live, either, Meadows said.
“The board of elections is not a college student’s babysitter,” Meadows said. “They’re not five years old.”
Kathy Kirkpatrick, head of the Guilford County Democratic Party, said the vote not to include the campuses is part of a larger tactic of voter suppression by Republicans.
She pointed to the purging of voter files, gerrymandering, and the shift of board appointments from the governor to the state auditor as a pattern.
“Voting rights are under attack,” Kirkpatrick said. “It is part of a broader picture of what’s going on today.”
Jeff Carmon, a Democrat who has been on the state board since 2019, said he sees voting access as an increasingly partisan issue.
“In some of the presentations we’ve had in the past, Republican plans have made it clear they’re against Sunday voting and early voting on college campuses,” he said.
Millen, the other Democratic member of the state board, said she’s seeing her Republican colleagues vote as a bloc more.
As for how they’ll vote when the Guilford County plans come before them, neither Millen nor Carmon would say. However, each emphasized the importance of voting access.
“I’ve always seen the importance of having voting sites on college campuses,” Carmon said. “I think it’s only fair to make it as easy for students to vote as possible.”
The Republican members of the state board did not respond to interview requests.
Excluding college campuses as early-voting sites is part of a national trend, said Caroline Smith, director of programs at the Andrew Goodman Foundation. Smith concentrates on campuses across the country, working to boost youth civic and electoral engagement.
In other parts of the state and across the country, student advocacy has led some county boards in North Carolina to include campuses as early-voting sites for next year. There are sites on 11 campuses, according to Smith, including East Carolina University.
Looking to January, when the state board members are expected to decide the final early-voting locations, local students are hoping for a positive outcome. Young people in the community will shape society for years to come, Nail said, and need easier access to voting.
“The students and the youth are what’s really driving the difference in the future,” Nail said.