In March, Davie County Elections Director Melissa Parker held a Voter ID Q&A event.
She wanted to answer the public’s questions ahead of the primary, the first statewide election North Carolinians had to show a valid photo ID to vote. Parker posted about the event on Facebook, the Davie County website and in the local newspaper. She set up lemonade and cookies for the crowd.
Nobody showed up.
Davie County is not unique; elections officials across the state have struggled to educate voters amid a constantly changing legal environment laden with misinformation. Education, outreach and marketing efforts vary across county lines, partially due to funding and staffing differences.
A Carolina Public Press analysis found that in a cross section of 21 North Carolina counties, 18 had no designated budget for voter education, outreach or marketing beyond the legal minimum of notices that local newspapers are paid to publish in print, often not appearing online at all.
Historically, the North Carolina State Board of Elections also has not received dedicated funding for voter education, outside of specific education about the new photo ID requirement, Board spokesperson Pat Gannon said in an email to CPP.
“As such, we must use existing personnel, who have many other responsibilities, for the very limited voter education and outreach we do,” Gannon wrote.
People have lost trust in the political system, Parker said.
“Having lived in a democracy their entire lives, they have no concept as to the importance of everyone’s vote, and how important that one vote could be,” she said.
“And until that privilege is lost to them, they’ll never realize how the lack of interest could affect them and their lives.”
How election funding works
In North Carolina, election funding is localized. County boards of election must request funding from their respective boards of county commissioners, who may approve or deny their budget requests.
For example, Wayne County Elections Director Anne Risku sought to create a fifth position on her staff last year, in anticipation for a busy 2024 election cycle and new photo ID requirements. She was denied, and not told why.
“I need another position to help me be able to do voter outreach, be able to handle all the public records requests, to process photo ID requests,” she said.
Election boards are required to issue legal notices in local newspapers giving notice about election dates, polling place hours and any issues voters may decide. Costs vary widely. Davie County spent $450 on legal notices this year, while Wake County had an $11,840 budget.
UNC-Charlotte Political Science Professor Martha Kropf studied election expenditures in North Carolina and the nation alongside three of her colleagues. Their book — A Republic if You Can Afford It: How Much Does It Cost to Administer Elections? — is coming out in October.
The amount spent per registered voter is “wildly different” across North Carolina, Kropf said. County commissioners must consider a variety of budgetary needs and respond to economic pressures, she said.
Alongside colleagues, Kropf published a 2019 research article in the American Journal of Political Science that found that North Carolina Republican county commissions spend significantly less on election administration once the county electorate reaches a sufficient Republican majority.
“If you’ve looked at some of the research that we’ve done, partisan politics could play a role in whether … a local election office gets the budget that they need and/or want,” Kropf said.
Election politicization has also occurred at the state level. In 2023, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature banned private donations for election administration after Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuck Bucks” group spent more per voter in Democratic-leaning counties, which subsequently increased turnout to a greater degree among Democrats.
Three types of voter education
When Leslie Garvin was a Guilford County elections official, she remembers people coming into the office on Election Day and seeing their sample ballots for the first time.
Garvin, executive director of North Carolina Campus Engagement, said the most significant gap in voter education is helping voters understand what and who is on the ballot in a nonpartisan way.
For example, voters don’t always know what, say, the commissioner of agriculture does, or what the candidates further down the ballot believe.
“Our fastest-growing voter group is unaffiliated, and we have to respect the fact that that’s going to require even more information, because it’s very possible these are folks who might want to vote different ways and not just go toe the party lines,” Garvin said.
But before they can get to more specific knowledge, New North Carolina Project Action First founder Aimy Steele said civic groups have to explicitly tie voting to people’s life outcomes.
“If a person knows that their vote actually informs whether … they get a grocery store down the street or a grocery store 20 miles away, then they’ll take that vote a little differently or more seriously than if they felt like voting just doesn’t matter, and overall it’s only going to be important for the president,” she said.
That is particularly important for communities of color, which Steele’s organization serves, she said. People of color have faced obstacles to voting in the past, and may not be encouraged to get involved because they don’t see a candidate “they can believe in,” she said.
Several other demographic groups may require more voter education. People who live in rural areas with a limited news media presence and smaller elections budget likely receive less information than North Carolina’s urban residents.
College students and senior voters alike may experience transportation issues. Garvin said fewer Gen Z college kids are getting their licenses, and also may not realize they’ve missed key absentee ballot deadlines to vote at home until it’s too late.
Voters new to North Carolina may also not understand why things are done a certain way, Director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity Andy Jackson said.
Elections officials and civic groups can’t assume that people know how to register to vote or even that there is an upcoming election, You Can Vote Executive Director Kate Fellman said.
Her organization often gets questions like whether people need to sign up in advance for early voting (they don’t), whether they need to go to the DMV to register to vote (that’s not required) and whether people need their North Carolina driver’s license to get registered (it’s an option, but a Social Security number also works).
“So I think everybody needs to get back down to the foundations of the mechanics of voting,” Fellman said.
“And then simplify it and not assume that people know the basics of keeping your registration up to date, of the three ways to vote, the deadlines and the eligibility rules, especially because there’s been so many changes.”
It’s impossible to be fully educated on anything, but functional knowledge is most important, Jackson said.
“Kind of like with driving, you just need to know the rules of the road,” he said. “You don’t need to know the mechanics of the cars. It might be helpful, but you don’t really need to know that.”
Voter education gaps exacerbated
Since the last presidential election, North Carolina election law has undergone major changes. Mail-in absentee voting rules and deadlines have gotten stricter, photo ID is now a requirement and people can register to vote during the early voting period at the polls, for example.
Risku said it’s difficult to keep voters updated.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I’ve been voting for 20, 30, years,’ so they think that they know how the process works, and then we change the processes.” she said.
Risku said Wayne County’s lower literacy rate and educational level makes filling out absentee ballots and voter registration forms, which include legal language, difficult. She said they get in “endless cycles” where a resident fills out a form incorrectly, sends it back detailing the deficiencies, but in the required legal language that caused the confusion in the first place.
“I’m sure there’s people we never hear back from that are just like, ‘Well, this is too hard,’ or ‘This is too complicated,’” Risku said. “We encourage people to call us, to email us. We’re happy to help, but we don’t know who we’re missing out there in these different processes.”
Additionally, more than 43% of North Carolina elections directors have left their jobs in the past five years. A Carolina Public Press investigation found that low pay in an increasingly demanding and politicized job is a key reason why.
“We’ve got to sort of build this as a profession and have salaries that are competitive enough that people will stay and build a career, because I think that contributes to voter education and awareness,” Garvin said.
Hyde County Elections Director Viola Williams told Carolina Public Press in an email that they have a very small staff and limited time for the amount of work they must do to run an election and combat misinformation.
It leaves little room for voter education and outreach.
“Our plates are over full and there is a steady addition of more,” Williams wrote.
Halifax County Elections Director Kristin Scott said distrust between the public and county elections officials is also contributing to gaps in voter education. She said community leaders need to back them up by sharing accurate information.
“I think a lot of it is because we’re the ones who are preparing and issuing out the ballots, and they feel that we’re the ones who are committing voter fraud,” Scott said. “So people are very leery of the information that comes from us.”
Several county elections directors told CPP that their electorate no longer reads the local paper, previously a common source of trusted information and often the only place where those required paid notices appear.
Less informed voters tend to fill in knowledge gaps with worst-case scenarios, Jackson said. Kropf agreed.
“If voters don’t have full information, then they’re easier to trick with misinformation,” she said.
Voter education solutions
After the 2020 election, Forsyth County went through an assessment process that found voters were generally unfamiliar with the voting process.
In 2021, the elections board launched Forsyth Academy, now a free, four-week program open to all county residents who want a behind-the-scenes look at how elections are conducted, from voter registration to campaign finance to ballot counting.
The biannual citizen’s academy accepted 40 participants in 2023, and Forsyth County Elections Director Tim Tsuji expects it to continue growing. Tsuji has served as an elections director for 19 years.
The Forsyth County Board of Elections is lucky, he said. It has support from the county’s communications department with a public information officer, a staff that can do video production and website development, and a social media presence on X, Instagram and Facebook. It sends E-newsletters with sample ballots and links to find polling places every election cycle, Tsuji said.
Not every county is as well-endowed. North Carolina elections stakeholders shared their ideas to create a more equitable system. Several named funding as the priority.
While complete removal from partisan politics is almost impossible, elections funding should be as independent as possible from political interests, Kropf said. She suggested a system of state funding based on how many people vote, or federal government contributions, as potential solutions.
Garvin said maybe the state could pay for one big print where everyone gets a sample ballot and a postcard, or tax forms could include an option to donate to voter education.
Steele said more consistent funding to nonpartisan civic groups would help them build relationships in non-presidential election years. Organizations like New North Carolina Project Action First often get funds far too late in the cycle to make the difference they’d like to make, she said.
“It is the most cyclical mess I’ve ever seen,” Steele said.
Others said voter education needs to be built from the ground up.
Instilling a sense of civic responsibility from a younger age is one of the biggest investments North Carolina can make in a strong democracy, Fellman said.
“All research in major democracies across the world shows that if you vote three times in a row upon eligibility, you vote for life,” she said. “It’s just a habit, just like learning to make your bed or learning to take out the trash.”
The Department of Education could work with the State Board of Elections to create a high school local government curriculum, Parker said.
There’s a need for a more modern approach to voter education involving social media and texting platforms, particularly among younger voters, Garvin said. Paid media like billboards and Facebook ads wouldn’t hurt, she added.
Buncombe County Elections Director Corinne Duncan said her office has had success attaching to community leaders who are already holding events. Her office has also embraced social media and connecting with local media groups for exposure.
“People listen to who they trust,” she said.
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