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With Court Filing, A Renewed Push For Early Voting Expansion

People waited in line for hours at the Forsyth County Board of Elections in downtown Winston-Salem to cast their ballots during the last day of early voting in 2012. WFDD/Keri Brown

Opponents of broad changes to North Carolina's voting laws won a big court decision over the summer, but the legal fight isn't over yet.

In an emergency court filing Saturday, plaintiffs argued that early voting hours should be extended in five counties, including Forsyth and Guilford.

The federal Fourth Circuit this summer found many of the changes from North Carolina's 2013 voting laws unconstitutionally targeted minority voters. The decision led to a reworking of early-voting plans across the state.

The new filing argues that Guilford County reduced the number of first-week early voting sites from 16 in 2012 to one this year. Plaintiffs criticized the Forsyth plan for not including Sunday voting and for not not using Winston-Salem State University as an early-voting precinct.

Supporters of the current plans say they represent bipartisan compromises following the federal court ruling.

Plaintiffs are asking for a ruling by Friday. Early voting begins Oct. 20.  

 

 

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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