On Aug. 20, the North Carolina State Board of Elections will decide early voting plans for counties where bipartisan local elections boards couldn’t unanimously agree on options for the 2026 general election. The State Board of Elections’ August early voting meeting will cap months of problematic local processes that could now affect at minimum 1.8 million voters’ ability to cast a ballot in counties with non-unanimous early voting plans, including over 100,000 registered voters in Rowan. It was as if the decisions about Rowan’s early voting plan had already been handed down from Raleigh. But this murky process of “gerrymandering” early voting plans wasn’t something county officials learned only from state lawmakers. Regardless of how state and local officials try to hide details of their early voting decision-making, as with gerrymandering, it’s all voters who pay the price.