A dispute over the location of a secondary early voting location in Kanawha County touches on electoral issues such as convenient access to polls and the increasing political divide between urban and rural voters.
The downtown Charleston site will make voting more convenient, but for which voters?
Kanawha County officials have proposed a community voting location on Charleston’s West Side to alleviate congestion a the main early balloting site at the downtown Voters Registration Office. The Kanawha County Republican Executive Committee initially exercised a veto on that decision, citing the cost and location.
Then, this week, the state Attorney General, Secretary of State and state Elections Commission ramped up their involvement to try to clarify what should happen.
“What we did in Kanawha County was to allow legal voters to vote,” Kanawha County Commissioner Kent Carper said this morning on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
“It’s bipartisan. I’m confident that this will work out. We’ve done nothing but try to increase the opportunity to vote and have lines that aren’t long. It was bipartisan, and I’m proud of it.”
These are strains of a debate throughout American politics, where access to the voting booth flows into the current of political advantage or disadvantage. Electoral battlegrounds across the country, from Atlanta to Arizona, are grappling over ballot access and the likely effect on voting outcomes.
Through a quirk of an outdated state regulation, the Kanawha County Republican Party had an opening to thwart the proposed early voting expansion in an urban location where more voters are likely to be Democrats. For the time being, the county GOP exercised a veto.
“I do think that location will provide an advantage to some voters as opposed to others elsewhere in the county,” Kanawha GOP Chairwoman Tresa Howell said in an email today.
Howell cited statistics showing that of the 6,286 registered voters on Charleston’s West Side, only 1,233 are registered as Republicans while 3,331 are Democrats and 1,130 are independent or unaffiliated and 592 are members of lower-profile parties.
“Voters in various precincts have been impacted with sites closing or moving to other locations,” she said. “Voters who do not travel to Charleston to early vote at the two locations 0.8 mile apart want to be a priority as well.”
On the other hand, groups like the Charleston NAACP and West Virginia Citizen Action have rallied in support of the additional downtown voting site. “Regardless of the cost, you can’t put a price on voting,” those groups contended.
“There has been a trend in other states to cut back on early voting, often targeting communities of color. Working and lower-income people all over West Virginia already face many struggles. Voting should not be one of those struggles,” Mary Ann Claytor, co-chairwoman of the state Democratic Party’s Black Caucus, said at a rally to support the voting site.
Politics were not a factor in Kanawha County’s desire to establish the early voting site, said Carper, the Kanawha commission president. He said the location would not produce an advantage for either Republicans or Democrats.
“Neither one. If you really understand community voting, anybody can vote there no matter where you live in the county,” he said. “Eight thousand people voted at Voter’s Registration. It’s too crowded. It doesn’t favor anyone.”
Nevertheless, the community voting location proposed for the Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council Building at 321 Virginia St. West went into a tempest of regulation and politics.
In 2009, the state Legislature passed a measure allowing additional early voting locations by county commissions and clerks with written agreement by county executive committees of the two major political parties. In essence, that gave county party executives a veto power.
The Secretary of State’s Office was responsible in 2010 for providing the details through written rules to apply the law.
In 2011, state lawmakers amended what they had done and removed the requirement for the two party chairpersons to agree. Instead, the local party executives could nominate locations.
Although the law was altered, the accompanying bureaucratic rule remained in place, never formally lifted. So the law and the rule were at odds, a sticking point in this situation.
Over the past few months, as Kanawha’s government considered the additional early voting location, the Kanawha County Republican Executive Committee objected to the cost and to establishing a new location in the heart of Charleston when other areas of the sprawling county would not receive similar treatment.
“If it’s going to be something that taxpayers would have to fund and the neutrality of the locations, you have to look at that as well,” Kanawha County GOP Chairwoman Howell told commissioners earlier this year, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail newspaper.
The cost of maintaining the additional site over the early voting period would be about $50,000, Carper responded. As to the site, Kanawha officials have said it’s in an area where people from all parts of the county are likely to be working during the day.
The legal issues went to the state Attorney General’s Office, which issued an opinion this week concluding that the current law has standing over the outdated rule.
The opinion noted that the Legislature twice dealt with the issue, once to give authority to local party executives and then to rescind it. So lawmakers were being deliberate with their intent, the Attorney General concluded.
“In sum, West Virginia Code of State Rules § 153-13-3.5 creates additional veto authority that the Legislature removed from the operative statute in 2011,” the Attorney General’s Office concluded. “A reviewing court would almost certainly find that the rule and statute conflict—and in that case, the statute would control.”
With that opinion in hand, the state Elections Commission met in emergency session today. Commissioners expressed no argument with the Attorney General’s bottom line. But they did spend nearly an hour exploring a related issue, whether Kanawha County had met a statutory deadline to establish the additional voting location.
Because the decision-making process unfolded over several meetings and months, much of the questioning by elections commissioners focused on trying to pinpoint at what point the actual decision was made.
After a brief discussion in executive session, members of the Elections Commission returned and advised the Secretary of State’s Office to provide written guidance to Kanawha County leaders about how to proceed.
During today’s emergency meeting, Kanawha County’s deputy manager noted that the downtown location at the Voters Registration Office is by far the most used early polling location of the eight current locations. The county processed 22,679 early votes in 2020, and 7,995 of those were cast at the Voters Registration Office.
Andrew Gunnoe, Kanawha’s deputy manager, characterized the lines as long and elaborated that there is no on-street parking close by. Gunnoe went on to say the pandemic resulted in unprecedented levels of mail-in voting in 2020, a situation that is unlikely to repeat. So in-person voting levels are likely to continue any strain on the central location.
“It’s crowded. There are lines there,” Gunnoe told the Elections Commission. “That was really what drove the county clerk and the county commission to look for more sites in the Charleston.”
He added, “What we’re trying to do is provide an additional early voting location to allow any registered voter in Kanawha County — it doesn’t matter where you live — to vote early for the Primary Election in a location that’s secure, that has good parking and that is accessible.”