Record Turnout for Ocracoke Early Voting

Compare that to 2016, when 250 Ocracokers voted early and 251 voted on Election Day for a total of 501 votes. 

We expect to exceed that number for 2020.

There were two days of One-Stop Early Voting on Ocracoke, on October 22nd and 23rd. Hyde County elections director Viola Williams was on the island to assist at the polls, along with Ocracoke election workers (a.k.a. judges) Gary Davis, Melinda Sutton, Dale Mutro, and Dick Jacoby. 

I asked Viola about the number of registered voters on Ocracoke. She didn't have the exact figure at hand, and said there had also been some same-day registrants at Early Voting (yay!), so she would work on getting me a total. We both recalled the number being right around 800. She also mentioned that 70 of those are considered "inactive." In North Carolina, all you have to do to activate your inactive registration is to show up to vote. Viola also told me she has received about 70 mail-in ballots from Ocracoke. That's just a coincidence, but it did make it easy for her to know how many ballots to print. 

Hmmm, thought I, if there are 800+ registered voters on the island that means 800 adults who are citizens who bother to register. Knowing that Ocracoke has at least 200 under-eighteens, and a not-insignificant non-voting population in the Latino community (100?), and at least 20-ish eligible voters who aren't even registered that I know of from being nosy about it and probably more I haven't checked up on.... well, I had to totally rethink my assumptions about Ocracoke's population numbers. 

When asked how many year-round residents there are on Ocracoke, most of us answer "About a thousand." But if we really do have 800+ registered voters, then we must have more than 1000 people living here. So, I looked into the voter rolls I found on the NCSBE website. 

According to the Hyde County voter registration records I downloaded, Ocracoke has 827 registered voters. (That list includes all the new people we registered at the Voter Registration Days hosted by Ocracoke Library! Welcome, y'all!)

It also includes a bunch of people that maybe shouldn't be on the list. For my Friday night fun, I looked at each one of the 827 registrants' names. Of those, I counted 148 names that I know are either 1. deceased; or 2. long since moved off the island and most likely voting elsewhere if at all. 13 names were people I had never heard of and I know I don't know  everyone, but usually I've heard or seen their names. Many of Ocracoke's registered voters turned out to be part-time residents or NRPOs. (And SO many of y'all go by your middle names.) I subtracted my total of "questionable" voters (161) from the registration list (827) and got = 666. The number of the beast.An omen? I hope not.

(No one on my "questionable" list is committing voter fraud. It's quite possible to be on the voter rolls in more than one place. When you move and register in a new town or precinct, your new registration should trigger a cancellation of your old one, as should your death certificate. But nothing's perfect and that doesn't always happen. That's not fraud. It's only illegal if you vote more than once.)

Ultimately, I think 666 is a more plausible number of actual Ocracoke voters who live and work here year round. Which means that we can keep saying "about a thousand" people live here and it will be pretty close to true. 

And we can also cheer that 346 votes cast is over 50% already! I know lots of people (including myself) who haven't voted yet, so I've got faith we'll surpass the 501 votes in 2016. Maybe we'll earn a passing grade on voter turnout! 

In Hyde County, we vote on paper ballots (using pens that we get to keep this year because: COVID), and feed them into a machine that provides a running tally of how many people have voted. I call it the Scantron because I went to high school in the 80's and it does the same thing: reads the little darkened bubbles. 

Viola explained that the machine has a memory card in it that she will save until Election Day. She can't run the results of the early votes until Election Day evening. Just before the polls close at 7:30, she will print out the results of all the Early Voting on Ocracoke and the mainland and report that information to the state. When the polls close, she'll report the Election Day results. If all goes well, we'll know how Ocracoke and Hyde County voted a little later that evening. 

And if all goes really, really well, we'll know the results from all over these great United States before we go to sleep. 

If you're still wondering about how, when, and where to vote, click here.