96-year-old NC woman says she waited 2 hours to vote on Election Day after error at polls

Narcissus Lowery is more than a casual voter.

Be it a local, state or national race, the 96-year-old is bound to show up at the West Charlotte Recreation Center polling station, just a few minutes from her longtime home.

And she does her research. She’s prefers traditional news instead of Facebook. These days she likes Morning Joe on MSNBC, CBS News and Good Morning America.

“When you vote, you’ve got a voice,” she told The Charlotte Observer.

But on Election Day last week, Lowery said she heard something new: Her ballot had already been cast.

“Can you imagine how I felt?” she asked.

Television news station WBTV first reported on the conundrum, which Lowery said was solved only after she waited for hours.

Two hours to vote in Charlotte

Lowery and her daughter on Tuesday took the familiar trip to the West Charlotte Recreation Center, and waited to vote from their car. But they were perplexed when someone brought only the daughter’s papers to sign, they said.

“What’s wrong? Where’s mine?” Lowery remembered asking.

“There’s something going on,” she recalled the poll worker saying. “They say you’ve already voted.”

As time dragged on and little changed, she waited and worried: Who could have voted in her name?

“The sun was shining when I came up,” she recalled with a laugh. “The sun is going down, y’all.”

It took more than two hours before she could cast her ballot, Lowery and her daughter said. But she stayed patient.

County Board of Elections spokesperson Kristin Mavromatis gave a different account.

“The lady did not want to vote curbside and yet she could not walk into the building,” Mavromatis said in an email.

Lowery ultimately voted curbside, something she’s done 18 times since 2013, according to State Board of Elections records. Though there was some delay, it didn’t take two hours, Mavromatis said. The spokesperson did not elaborate when a reporter asked about the claim that Lowery had already cast her ballot.

History of voting in Charlotte

Lowery’s not sure why elections workers said she voted before visiting her usual polling spot or how it was fixed.

“I can’t say nothing about the system because I don’t know,” she said. She was just glad to cast a ballot at 96 years old. She’s voted in an election every year but one since 1987, according to records.

She hit the polls long before then, though. The habit started not long after she got her Social Security card in the 1950s, she said. So, Lowery’s research has been aided by a near-century of watching history unfold.

Speaking to an Observer reporter and a photographer, she recalled when President Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train carried him from Georgia to Washington, D.C.

“Thank God she can remember stuff,” her daughter, Carolyn Lowery Harrison, said. “She’s a wealth of information.”

Voting wasn’t always a guarantee, Harrison noted.

Across the South Black people saw their voting rights systematically thwarted well into the 20th century with bureaucratic, racist restrictions.

Harrison offers a lesson for the youngest generation of voters, who are generally less enthusiastic about going to the polls. In the 2016 election, for example, people 65 and older reported a high turnout at almost 71%, according to the United States Census Bureau. The youngest age bracket — 18- to 29-year-olds — saw a turnout just over 46%.

“I try to let them know the struggle they went through for that privilege,” Harrison said.

That struggle is one major reason that Lowery takes time for the ballot box. She wants to be counted, she said.

“I can’t tell you who to vote for, and I can’t tell you who I’m going to vote for,” she added. “But I’m going to vote as long as I’m able to vote.”