North Carolina Makes Voting More Difficult for HBCU Students – Again
North Carolina officials recently rejected an early voting site at the nation’s largest historically Black university. Now, students at North Carolina A&T University (NCAT) want to know why their right to vote has to come with extra hurdles.
The state’s GOP-controlled election board recently rejected an effort to establish an early voting location at A&T for a second time, according to Democracy Docket. The decision means students will have to leave campus to cast an early ballot for the midterm elections in November.
For a state with such a long history of Black student activism, this debate carries particular weight. At A&T, four students helped launch the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960. More than six decades later, students are still fighting for access to the ballot – this time over whether they can cast that ballot somewhere close to home.
But more than just an abstract debate about election administration, advocates are raising concerns over what they say is a transportation problem, a time problem and a question of whether voting is realistically accessible at all.
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A&T students have expressed that the decision has made casting their vote more difficult. Some walked more than 30 minutes to an off-campus polling location earlier this year. Others organized transportation to help their classmates get to the polls.
The fight has also extended beyond A&T.
The Guilford County Board of Elections declined to establish early voting sites at UNC Greensboro for the 2026 general election, despite students pushing for campus locations, according to WFMY News. That makes this more than a dispute over where to put a few voting machines.
On a college campus, an early voting site can mean the difference between walking across campus to vote and having to find transportation, work around a class schedule or make an unfamiliar trip across town.
The consequences can be particularly significant for students who don’t have cars. At many colleges, including A&T, freshmen living on campus aren’t allowed to bring their vehicles. North Carolina’s same-day voter registration during early voting also makes convenient polling locations especially important for out-of-state students who recently moved to the state and may not yet be registered.
Carolyn Bunker, one of the board’s two Democratic members, voted to keep the polling places at NCAT and UNC Greensboro open, just as they were during the 2024 presidential election cycle, according to NC News Line.
“One out of four younger voters, 18 to 25, voted during the 2024 presidential election at these two sites that we had,” Bunker said during a July hearing. “We can, I think, expand our sites fairly easily and give our folks the things that they have asked for, and [have] diligently come to our board of elections meetings and requested.”
Students are not taking the decision quietly.
A&T students have organized protests, transportation efforts and voter-education campaigns. Their message is straightforward – making voting harder does not make students less interested in voting. Instead, they say, it just makes the people already facing barriers work that much harder to participate.
