North Carolina

Wake County has about 775,000 registered voters. Twenty early voting sites. If only 65% of the registered voters turn out (and let's hope it's higher this year)--and say half turn out for early voting--that's 251,875 possible early voters to be handled at 20 sites, or about 12,600 voters to be handled at each site (and you know some will be busier than others). Divide by 17 days of early voting (some are half days on Sat/Sun at the closest site to me) and that's 741 voters/day at each site. On full days, the particular early voting site is open 11.5 hours (or 64 voters/hour) and on 5 hour half days (148 voters/hour). Of course, people are not going to turn up in equal numbers all day long.

In theory, that looks like lines to me. As a person at high risk for COVID-19, I don't want to stand in line to vote. I never did at my downtown location where I walked to in 5 minutes--not even for the 2018 General Election.

The resident population of downtown Raleigh was estimated at 10,800 in 2019. Probably a high percentage are registered voters. To my mind, we deserve an early voting location to which we can walk, because that's why we live downtown. To walk!

And don't get me started on the distribution of African American voters in downtown vs. more suburban areas.