A GOP county elections board member said he was warned against voting for a campus polling site

[RandySF]

A Republican member of the Jackson County Board of Elections said he was pressured to vote to keep an early voting site off Western Carolina University’s campus this fall.

That member, Jay Pavey, voted for a plan that included a WCU early voting polling place, despite what he said were threats from his party to remove him from the board if he did.

“‘I’ve been told that if I don’t vote a particular way, that they will, they will do whatever they have to do to remove me from the board,” Pavey said.

Jackson County Elections Board Chairman Bill Thompson also said he’d been getting “pressure from above” to prevent the campus from hosting an early voting site for the fall election. His was the sole vote against placing a site on the university campus.



https://ncnewsline.com/2026/06/03/a-gop-county-elections-board-member-said-he-was-warned-against-voting-for-a-campus-polling-site/

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

1. Young educated people..they dont want voting

[blm]

2. This should be considered as a criminal act.

[mtngirl47]

3. This is my county.

We have a Republican operative that showed up in 2010 and he's trying to run the county. He's affiliated with some Koch Brothers type organizations, and they pay him to stir up trouble and make threats like this.

Since the vote wasn't unanimous it will have to go to the State Board of Elections--run by Republicans since the General Assembly made an end run around the Governor in the lame duck session. So, although I will thank Jay Pavey for standing up to the Republican Party, we will probably not have an early voting site on the WCU campus.

The local Democratic party will make a plan to get students to the polls. This will just make local people mad. They are already mad because local taxes were raised by the Republicans and they allowed some religious nuts to censor books and take our library out of a multi-county group so they could censor some more books.