[Durham INC] Early voting begins Thursday

[Pat Carstensen]

Please cascade this to neighborhood list-serves if you think it is useful.

Early Voting and Same Day Registration starts this week.  Some exciting races (based on the number of signs and TV ads) are the Republican Primary for Senate, Democratic Primary for US House 04, and School Board.

The full schedule of early voting is at https://www.dcovotes.com/home/showpublisheddocument/36244/637807804159370000.  The polls are open from 8 AM to 7:30PM on weekdays and some hours on weekends, and there are 8 locations (Main, North, South and East Libraries, NCCU, ERUFF, Durham Tech and the River Church).

The election folks are excited about "real-time mapping tool" that shows the wait time at each site (https://durhamnc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=3ba5733d5de645debd6e6089e92c7f32) so you can see where to go for the least waiting time.  It is supposed to be updated every 30 minutes. In general, voting on Monday to Wednesday and later in the day are good times to avoid crowds.

For some sites, the bottleneck is how many people can be in the act of voting at the same time although this will be less of a problem this year because there is less social distancing among booths.  Get your sample ballot by looking yourself up at https://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup/ (you can carry in your list of choices on your phone).  I generally advocate looking yourself up once a year or so just to make sure your record is still accurate.

How long your ballot is will depend which party ballot you have.

  *   The vote for the School Board is final; there are no run-offs or second rounds. Everyone except 17-year-olds can vote for this race (17-year-olds who will be 18 on or before November 8 have their own version of the ballot; they get to vote in the primary part of the ballot, since it's not fair to show up in November with no-one you want to vote for).
  *   I think write-in only happens in the School Board races -- you don't get to write in primary candidates.
  *   An office only appears on the primary part of the ballot if there are 2 or more candidates from the party represented on the ballot.

If you are using curbside, there is a pole with a button on it that will ring a bell to let the election officials know you are waiting.

You obviously need ID if you are registering; pretty much anything "official" that connects your name to your current address (on paper on or your phone) will work.  Otherwise, few people will need to show ID  (the exception is a few cases when something didn't match up on registrations sent in -- another reason to look yourself up in the voter rolls since https://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup/ should warn you if you need an ID.).

If you want to use Ballots by Mail, the information is at http://www.dcovotes.com/voters/voting/absentee-voting (this has been available for the last month).  To return the ballot, either mail it or make sure it is being carried in by you or a "near relative" (there is an official list of what counts as "near").  You can track your ballot at: https://northcarolina.ballottrax.net/voter/



Regards, pat



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