Orange loses voting site

Planetarium no longer has room

CHAPEL HILL -- Orange County's most popular early-voting site will not reopen for voters this October.

Space in the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center used in the last seven elections is being renovated for a new permanent exhibit, so the planetarium will no longer be able to accommodate the thousands of voters who cast ballots during the 2 1/2 weeks before election day.

Steve Allred, UNC-Chapel Hill's executive associate provost, said the university is working with the Orange County Board of Elections to find a new polling place.

"We have provided this service for the last number of years, and we're committed to working with the Board of Elections to find suitable space on campus," he said.

Last year, nearly 2,800 people voted early at the planetarium. They represented more than 40 percent of the early ballots cast and 8 percent of the total ballots cast in the 2006 general election. The county's other early voting sites sites were at the Carrboro Town Hall and the Orange County Library in Hillsborough.

"It'd be a travesty if it's lost," Orange County Commissioner Moses Carey said at a meeting Monday night.

The exhibit replacing the voting space will feature items from the Hardaway Collection, a group of 10,000- to 12,000-year-old Native American artifacts excavated by the university in Stanly County in the 1950s and 1970s.

Vin Steponaitis, a professor of anthropology and director of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, said the collection was donated to the university in stages by the Alcoa Co., which owned the land on which the items were found. The final donation came about a year and a half ago.

There has not been a major exhibition of the collection, which includes many stone tools used for hunting and cutting, since the 1970s, Steponaitis said.