Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary; Democracy Docket, February 18, 2026

 Natalie Hausmann, Democracy Docket; Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary

"Olu Rouse clearly remembers the first time he voted.

He was a freshman at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), and he meticulously researched candidates before he cast his ballot at his on-campus voting site in the 2024 presidential primary election.

Today, that voting site doesn’t exist. 

Rouse, now a third-year student, is just one of the thousands of students in North Carolina who lack easy access to early voting sites on their college campuses — even as early voting for North Carolina’s primary election is underway.

That’s because the GOP-controlled North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) last month rejected early voting sites at NC A&T, the nation’s largest historically Black college, and three other college campuses across the state: Western Carolina University (WCU), the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (UNC-G) and Elon University.

Student advocates and voting rights experts have warned that the board’s decision represents a major assault on student voting rights in the state. But it has since also catalyzed student advocacy efforts to get out the vote.

Brian Kennedy, a senior policy analyst for the nonpartisan advocacy organization Democracy North Carolina, told Democracy Docket that this newest blow is just one of several efforts to suppress the Black vote across the state and narrow student voting access in general across the country.

“I think we’ve seen the blueprint for what voter suppression across the nation can look like here in North Carolina,” he said.

The legal battle

Rouse was one of dozens of students present at the Jan. 13 NCSBE meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, during which Republican state officials refused early voting sites at the four colleges, which together serve around 47,000 students.

Despite the objections of students who sent a letter to the board and showed up in person to protest the decision, the board denied two new midterm primary sites at UNC-G and NC A&T and rejected two existing sites at Elon University and WCU.  

Several students from NC A&T, WCU and UNC-G, as well as the College Democrats of North Carolina, raised their concerns in a lawsuit* against the board."