Friday (Oct. 24)
10 a.m.
West (Visitors’ Center) entrance to Morehead Building
UNC-Chapel Hill campus
Friday (Oct. 24)
10 a.m.
West (Visitors’ Center) entrance to Morehead Building
UNC-Chapel Hill campus
Media representatives are invited to attend an event to encourage and celebrate early and one-stop voting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In what has become a Carolina tradition, Chancellor Holden Thorp and Student Body President J.J. Raynor will speak briefly to a gathering outside the early voting site at Morehead before going inside to cast their ballots. Tar Heel Women’s Basketball Coach Sylvia Hatchell and other special guests will also be in attendance.
Carolina first hosted early voting in the fall of 2000. Since then, the Morehead Building has served as a polling place each year except in 2007, when voting was moved to the Chapel Hill post office because of construction at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.
Early one-stop voting for the 2008 general election began Oct. 16, and Morehead once again has been the busiest one of the five sites in the county, according to the Orange County Board of Elections. By the end of voting Tuesday (Oct. 21), 5,669 ballots had been cast at the Morehead site. In the 2004 general election, a total of 30,245 one-stop ballots were cast in the county, with the Morehead site leading the way with 12,939.
“Young Americans have typically voted at a lower rate than their elders, but among voters 18 to 29, college students tend to turn out at a greater rate than their age peers,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at Carolina. “The 2008 presidential primaries produced a substantial increase in young voter turnout. A major elevation of turnout of young voters, with college students leading the way, would add to the historic nature of the 2008 presidential election.”
The schedule for the remainder of early one-stop voting at Morehead follows:
- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 20-25, Oct. 27-31
- 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 1
Any voter registered in Orange County may vote early at an early one-stop site. In North Carolina, a resident who is qualified to vote but who misses the 25-day deadline for voter registration may also register and vote on the same day at an approved site during the One-Stop Absentee Voting period, but not on an election day. The other four early voting sites in Orange County are the Orange County Public Library and the Northern Human Services Center, both in Hillsborough; the Robert and Pearl Seymour Center in Chapel Hill; and Carrboro Town Hall.
Orange County Board of Elections Web site: http://www.co.orange.nc.us/elect/
News Services contact: Susan Houston, (919) 962-8415, susan_houston@unc.edu