[Durham INC] Early voting update

[Pat Carstensen]

I suspect that moving the municipal elections would increase the power of the PACs -- if you care enough about who is the mayor to study up on the candidates, you come out in the odd years.  If we had municipal elections with state and federal elections, a lot of the people who vote for president will either not vote down-ballot or vote according to whichever color sample ballot was thrust into their hands on the way in.

According to this article, odd-year elections were thought to preserve the "purity" of the local elections, away from the big money machines of state and national politics.  https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-north-carolina-has-off-year-elections

I don't know about what happened in the history of Durham municipal elections, but know that the districts, timing and non-partisan-ness of the school board elections were carefully negotiated across different interests in Durham, when the city and county systems merged in the 1990's.

Regards, pat


________________________________
From: RICHARD FORD <rbford at aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2023 6:25 PM
To: Pat Carstensen <pats1717 at hotmail.com>
Cc: inc listserv <inc-list at lists.deltaforce.net>
Subject: Re: [Durham INC] Early voting update

How do you feel about  doing away with odd year voting? You could argue that it acts as a very effective form of voter suppression!

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 30, 2023, at 6:19 PM, Pat Carstensen <pats1717 at hotmail.com> wrote:


After 10 days of early voting, 4459 people have cast votes at early voting, about 2.5% of the registered voters.  I think this puts us slightly ahead of where we were in 2021. Unfortunately it is way less than voting in 2022!

More and more people have been voting by mail (how to do it is at https://www.dcovotes.com/voters/voting/absentee-voting) so that will help the turn-out percentage as well.

The schedule and locations for early voting are at: https://www.dcovotes.com/home/showpublisheddocument/39098/638233928770830000

Details on the demographics of the turn-out are at: https://www.dconc.gov/home/showdocument?id=39520&t=638310047184110464

Picture ID seems to be going OK -- BoE has a lot of information on it at: https://www.dcovotes.com/voters/voter-id

A couple other changes:

  *
There are new improved machines to mark ballots for folks who are visually impaired or whose hands don't work as well as they used to.  (Please use them so we get more experience with them before next year).
  *
The folks checking you in will ask what year you were born in before they ask your address (they should not ask your full birthday unless that is the only way to find your record in the database).  You don't have to tell them how old you are, but it helps the process since every year there is a mix-up of 2 of members of the same household (dad has voted but Junior is the one marked in records as having voted), and they are hoping this will reduce the errors.  I guess at least some people are more embarrassed at giving their middle name than their birth year anyhow (-:
  *
Current law says your ID needs to "substantially" match in picture and name.  The address only needs to match if you are registering as a new voter.  The birthday doesn't need to match (but we have very occasionally found we have "bad data" and this is a good opportunity to get the information corrected).  If you want to check the name, address and birth year in your record, do a voter look-up at https://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup/.
  *
The "ballot box" (technically the tabulator) where you put your ballot at the end has cool new graphics on its screen.

Regards, pat
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