House Bill 66 would would move the start of early voting to the second Monday before an election, running through Saturday. Currently, the early voting period starts on the third Thursday before Election Day.
"I think that voters are busy people and they have a lot on their minds and they want to take advantage of voting, but making it as easy as possible is really the right thing to do to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to cast a ballot," said Jennifer Rubin, the President of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina.
Shruti Parikh, the Head of Education and Political Engagement with North Carolina Asian Americans Together, also expressed displeasure at the proposal.
"It's voter suppression at its finest, unfortunately. we should be making things easier for people to vote, not making it harder for them to vote." Parikh said.
Last cycle, more than 4.5 million North Carolinians used early voting, a record number. That figure accounted for 57% of all registered voters and more than 3/4 of all votes cast.
"We saw long lines with a huge early voting period this year. Condensing that will only make the lines worse. The burden on county boards of elections was the opportunity for people to get frustrated and leave and not cast their ballot. So this is really an attempt to limit voting. It's an attempt to dissuade voters to discourage them from turning out," said Rubin.
Parikh specifically mentioned the challenges that voters with limited English proficiency could face.
"A lot of them rely on others to come and translate for them, family members or a neighbor. And so not only are they reliant on scheduling around their own work schedules, but they have to worry about someone else's work schedule. Truncating the time will make missed opportunities more prevalent," said Parikh.
Andy Jackson, Director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at The John Locke Foundation, says data is mixed on the effect of shortening early voting on overall participation.
"Maybe you'd have a few more people voting on Election Day or voting by mail as well if they decide that they can't really manage that six-day period. So we'd see a big shift in how people vote. We probably wouldn't see much of a shift in the number of people voting because early voting by itself hasn't been shown to have a major impact on turnout," said Jackson.
The switch to six days would eliminate voting on Sunday, which has long been a point of contention.
"The counties that run Sunday voting are disproportionately Democratic counties. If you go back and we did look at this data if you go back and look at Sunday voting, those still those two days of Sunday voting that we had were still pretty heavily Democratic. And so that could be part of the equation there," said Jackson.
Courtney Geels, the NCGOP Chairwoman for the Fourth District, supports the measure.
"We're still going to have mail-in voting. We're still going to have early voting. I would argue mostly monetary value. You're going to have a lot less time to have to pay workers," said Geels.
Jackson agreed that there could be benefits.
"There are arguments for having less early voting. You can potentially at least save resources from the counties. Instead of running all these days of early voting, they can save time, effort, and money that they can focus on other aspects," Jackson noted.
Geels ran for Congress in 2022 and said she believes a shorter early voting period would benefit candidates.
"It's a lot easier for candidates to be out to work the polls and staff the polls," said Geels.
Republicans shifted their messaging regarding early voting last cycle, a move which largely benefitted them as they saw a surge in turnout during that period. Jackson said he believes that dispels the long-held myth that early voting would solely benefit Democrats. Further, he said he believes there may be an ideal early voting length between the proposed six days in this bill and the current 17-day period.
"Let's have 10 continuous days in every county, including Sunday voting in every county. Right now, I think about a third of counties ran early voting (on Sundays) last time. We should just have this so that voters across the state have a more equal access to that," said Jackson.
Parikh, Rubin, and Geels all agree that should the bill become law, they will need to step up their voter education and outreach.
"We will have to do more to help inform voters about what the opportunities are for early voting, encourage county boards of elections to potentially add voting sites for same for Election Day so that we can try to reduce the crowds on Election Day because those will clearly be bigger," said Rubin.
Parikh said new challenges would arise should the measure pass.
"Usually these bills pass without any kind of appropriation from in terms of money, so the onus falls on community organizations like ours to fill in those gaps of education which makes it even more difficult," said Parikh.
The current version of the bill does not include any section or language regarding funding.
Geels said she's not surprised by the timing of this bill.
"This has been a push from the Republican Party and conservatives. It's a classic conservative principles to have the same values yesterday as we do today," said Geels.
Olivia McCall, Director of the Wake County Board of Elections, said her team is used to dealing with changes each cycle.
"There's going to be challenges with that just based on higher turnout in a condensed period of time. But again, I like to say there's a solution for everybody," said McCall, who encouraged voters to reach out directly with any questions.
Wake County operated a record number of early voting sites in 2024.
"We would definitely want to make sure that our staffing levels are as high as possible so we can get people in and out because still being that it's a very popular voting method, you may have all that turnout in the same amount of time," said McCall.
HB 66 passed on first reading and has been referred out to Committee.
ABC11 reached out to the bill's four primary sponsors: Rep. Wyatt Gable, Rep. Steve Tyson, Rep. Keith Kidwell, and Rep. Paul Scott.
Gable and Scott were unavailable for interviews, and Tyson and Kidwell did not respond to interview requests.