By Brooke Medina

Research shows that decreasing days for early voting does not depress voter turnout — and some studies have even linked it to increased voter turnout. 

And that’s not all. I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to you, but counties often spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars (and countless hours) maintaining voting sites for weeks. It’s expensive and exhausting. 

In other words, reducing early voting days saves a lot of money and time for North Carolinians. So how can we save money and ensure participation?

A steady fact of life is that we can’t make everyone happy. However, there is a fair compromise.

One of the complaints about early voting in North Carolina is that most counties don’t allow voting on Sundays (when some data shows many African-Americans vote). But if we extend voting to just one Sunday during the early voting period, we can increase access for communities across North Carolina.

In addition to that, we can reduce the number of early voting days across the state. By pairing these two (pretty common sense) ideas together, we can save money and ensure fair opportunities to vote.

Brooke Medina is the VP of Communications for the John Locke Foundation.