Republicans took control of elections administration in mid-2025 and, in some counties, they have quickly moved to enact two longtime party goals: Eliminating Sunday hours and campus polling places during early voting.

Those decisions have now led to political disputes in a handful of counties statewide, which will be up to the GOP-majority State Board of Elections to settle in a meeting Tuesday.

The state board is scheduled to review and vote Tuesday on early voting plans in a dozen counties, including Cumberland, Harnett, Wayne and others. All failed to receive unanimous support at the county level so now require final approval by the state elections board.

The plans are for the March primaries only. But the outcomes Tuesday could give clues to how willing the state board might be to allow similar strategies in November.

Republican state lawmakers’ most recent effort to target Sunday voting — part of wider-ranging changes to state election law passed in 2013 — was struck down in federal court as unconstitutional for being motivated by intentional racial discrimination. Black voters use Sunday voting disproportionately more than white voters.

 At the time, Republican lawmakers argued in court that they should be allowed to target Black voters because the majority of Black voters are affiliated with the Democratic Party. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit strongly disagreed, striking down the law in a harshly worded ruling, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.”

Republicans haven’t tried seriously since then to eliminate Sunday voting statewide. Some did cosponsor a bill at the legislature to do so in 2025, but GOP leaders didn’t allow it up for a vote. It remains to be seen whether new county-by-county efforts to target Sunday voting will meet similar legal fates.

So far, two small-scale efforts to target Sunday voting have been allowed in the state. WRAL reported in August that GOP officials in Davidson and Union counties asked to cut back on Sunday voting for the 2025 municipal elections, which the state elections board approved in 3-2 votes along party lines.

“I do not want us to regress back to a previous time,” Democratic board member Siobhan Millen said at the time, as she voted against those plans. 

Most of the board’s Republicans offered no explanation for eliminating Sunday voting for that handful of 2025 races, WRAL reported at the time. Republican board member Stacey Eggers said he thought it was important to let elections workers get some rest.

Details of the plans

Sunday voting isn’t the only contentious topic on agenda for Tuesday’s meeting. Attempts to eliminate on-campus voting sites at N.C. A&T University, UNC-Greensboro and Western Carolina University are up for discussion. So are other contentious plans from areas including Cumberland, Harnett and Wayne counties.

The state board already approved early voting plans for most of North Carolina’s 100 counties, since most counties approved their plans in a bipartisan, unanimous fashion. Every county elections board has three Republicans and two Democrats.

Tuesday’s meeting is meant to focus on the dozen counties where March early voting plans didn’t win unanimous approval, due to political or logistical disputes.

In Cumberland County, for example, there are multiple competing issues. The county election board’s professional staff suggested using five early voting sites, all in Fayetteville. The board’s political appointees, however, want seven sites. Complicating matters further is that the board’s political appointees also don’t fully agree on where to put those extra sites. All agree with having at least five sites in Fayetteville and one in Hope Mills. But there’s a dispute over whether to put a sixth site in Fayetteville, or to open one in Spring Lake instead.

Disputed early voting plans from Guilford and Jackson counties, meanwhile, revolve around the efforts to eliminate college campus polling places. Other counties are fighting over Sunday voting, including Wayne and Pitt counties, home to Goldsboro and Greenville.

In Pitt County, the GOP majority on the county elections board says only a few dozen dozen people have bothered showing up to vote on Sundays in each of the past few primary elections. Paying to keep the sites open for such little return isn’t a good investment for the county, they argue in filings to the state, not to mention the fact that there are fewer and fewer people who want to help work at local polling places.

“Pitt County, like every other county in the state, is seeing a significant drop in civic engagement, particularly with election workers,” the board’s Republicans wrote to the state. “Finding workers to manage and work in locations, especially on Sundays, is extraordinarily difficult.”

In Harnett County, the dispute is over an attempt to shut down the polling place at Western Harnett High School in Lillington and replace it with two new sites, one at the Benhaven Community Center and the other at the Anderson Creek fire department.

American Airlines subsidiary PSA officially opened its new headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday.

The carrier moved its corporate office from Dayton, Ohio, and plans to have over 450 employees at its Charlotte campus. The headquarters is situated about two miles from American Airlines’ Charlotte Flight Training Center and five miles from Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where many PSA staff are based.

PSA is now the only Part 121 passenger carrier based in North Carolina, company leaders said.

“Because of what Charlotte offers, PSA has a stronger foundation for continued growth,” PSA President and CEO Dion Flannery said in a statement. “And we believe the benefit will be mutual, as the region will continue having reliable aviation partners, a top employer, and a responsible corporate citizen headquartered in its backyard.”

Of the 450 employees expected to be based in Charlotte, about 150 have relocated from Dayton and another 50 were already in Charlotte at other facilities. The other 250 positions are being filled by new hires.

PSA operates flights under the American Eagle brand. It directly supports four American Airlines hubs – Charlotte, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Washington National.

A grand opening event at the headquarters in Charlotte will take place in March.

PSA will maintain a significant presence in Dayton, with hundreds of employees, including pilots, flight attendants, and technicians, based at the airline’s crew base and maintenance hangar at Dayton International Airport.

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY)–As many as one thousand people gathered in downtown Wilmington around Thalian hall as part of the “Ice Out for Good” protest.

This protest is one of many throughout the country to protest against ICE, after the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot in the head by an ICE agent on January 7^th.

Organized by Indivisible Actions Southeast North Carolina, protesters surrounded the building as they waved signs and chanted across third street.

Many of the protestors held signs to not only protest Trump and ICE, but also to remember Renee Nicole Good.

In the past week, Trump and many others say the ICE agent was just trying to defend himself, and many of the protestors disagree. Many say that Good was the victim in the situation.

“I think it needs to be a thorough investigation. Minnesota needs to be involved. There needs to be an ethical way of going about this. If there was nothing wrong, then they would cooperate. We need to keep investigating. We need to understand. I think they were way too quick to write off motivation. At the end of the day our neighbor or was killed,” said one protestor.

One other protestor says they are upset over what is being told. “That’s very disturbing to see a spin put on things when you have an actual video and then you’re propagandized about what we’re being told it was, even though we saw it was not.”

“Things could have been de-escalated by the officer,” said another protestor, believing that things didn’t have to turn out that way.

A Vigil for Good will be held outside the Alton Federal Building along Water Street. It will start at 7 in the evening on Wednesday, and it will be hosted by Siembra NC and Make North Carolina Work.