Voting while homeless: How to do it, the barriers, the solutions

Featured photo: Alexis R. tells her story outside the J. Douglas Galyon bus depot in Greensboro. (photo by Gale Melcher)

For Alexis R., who has been unsheltered since 2019, registering to vote causes her anxiety.

“Isn’t that how everybody can search your name and find your address though?” she asks with hair coiled into a topknot, glasses perched on her inquisitive face. She takes a seat at one of the tables in front of Greensboro’s downtown bus depot.

Alexis is right. 

In North Carolina the NC State Board of Elections’ voter lookup tool allows anyone to search a voter and find out their address, political affiliation and the last time they voted.

“That’s why I ain’t registered,” she admits. “That’s a fear a lot of people have, actually.”

Especially for members of the unsheltered community, deciding to disclose where they spend a lot of time can be concerning. 

Violence against unsheltered people has risen across the country. In 17 cities, nearly 1,300 people were murdered between 2010 and 2021.

“Stop putting our addresses on here, and then we’ll vote,” Alexis said.  “Some of us have situations where we can’t just be having everyone know where we at.”

And that’s if you have a stable address to list in the first place.

According to demographic and past election data, around more than 90 percent of North Carolina’s 7.9 million voting-eligible adults are registered to vote; more than 5.5 million people voted in 2020.

But for unsheltered people, the numbers are much smaller; as few as one in 10 unhoused people vote according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

And that’s due to a number of factors, including not having a permanent address, access to transportation as well as a lack of awareness of the registration process. But in the Triad, county leaders and nonprofit organizations are working to spread the word to unhoused populations that their votes matter.

“Even though I never vote, I do want to vote this year,” Alexis says.

How can you vote when you’re unhoused?

Charlie Collicutt has been working on elections for 22 years and has been the Guilford County Board of Elections director for 11 years. Ahead of the election, he and his office are making sure that people understand their right to vote.

“We do work with a lot of other civic organizations to make sure that we’re on the same page, that do different kinds of advocacies,” Collicutt says. “For somebody that is specifically homeless, residency is, where are you? Where do you sleep? Where are you more times than not?” 

According to Collicutt, that can be a shelter, a street corner, a park, etc.

Alexis didn’t know that, she says. She plans to register now, she tells TCB.

“Gotta vote somebody in. Choose the lesser evil, I guess.”

As she flips a composition notebook full of her kids’ drawings — one of them a bright red scribble of a character from the popular online game Among Us — a volunteer with Unifour One stops to talk to Alexis.

“Are y’all registered to vote?” asks Jordan, the volunteer.

“I’m not,” Alexis piped up, adding, “I’ll register with you?”

Jordan pulls out a batch of registration papers and places them, along with a pen, in front of Alexis.

She adds her name and birthdate. The next item voters need to fill in is either the last four digits of their social security number or driver’s license number.

Then she needs to add her residential and mailing address. 

“You can use the shelter address,” Jordan says.

According to North Carolina law, “residence shall be broadly construed to provide all persons with the opportunity to register and to vote, including stating a mailing address different from residence address.”

Alexis fills out the form, writing 407 E. Washington St., the address for the Interactive Resource Center, on the paper as her place of residence and checks the box indicating that the shelter is also her mailing address.

Tim Tsujii, who has been the Forsyth County Board of Elections director since 2016, explained that people registering to vote should make sure that they’re writing down a valid mailing address so that a voter registration card can be mailed there.

“If in the event the card is returned undeliverable, then that denies their voter registration,” Tsujii explained.

That’s why places like the IRC and Winston-Salem’s City With Dwellings are so vitally important. “Those organizations have mailboxes or PO boxes for folks to utilize to collect mail,” Tsujii said. “They can simply write that address and we’ll then mail the card to those mailboxes.”

Alexis hands her filled-out form back to Jordan, who thanks her for registering.

But county boards of elections have a limited ability to know how many unsheltered people vote, Tsujii explains.

“That would take some time to extract,” he says, “We’d have to physically look at the maps to identify if an address is a physical home.”

The deadline to register to vote in NC this year is Oct. 11. Those who miss the deadline can still register to vote if they bring a NC driver’s license, photo identification card with an address or utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or document from an educational institution that shows the voter’s name and current address with them during early voting which runs from Oct. 17 until Nov. 2.

If the voter’s address on their photo ID is different from their registered address, that doesn’t prevent them from being able to vote, explained Collicutt. “We’re going to ask the voter where they live, but if it’s different than what’s on the ID, that is okay.”

Collicutt also noted that there are exceptions for some voters who want to keep their addresses confidential.

North Carolina state law allows voters to keep their addresses confidential if they submit to the county board of elections a copy of a 50B protective order, a restraining order or an Address Confidentiality Program authorization card combined with a signed statement that they have good reason to fear their life or a family member’s life would be in jeopardy.

While this exception can offer voters some peace of mind, voters’ addresses being made public is “just something at this time with the law, we can’t get around,” Collicutt said.

Collicutt encourages people to make sure they register to vote before that deadline.

“It’s an easier process for everybody, but especially for people that may not have all of the necessary documents to do a same-day registration at early voting,” he said.

While she doesn’t have a place of her own right now, Alexis says, she spends some time at her fiancé’s grandmother’s place. Before that, she was sleeping in a hotel.

She couldn’t afford that anymore though, she says.

“Being displaced, automatically you want somewhere to run to,” she continues. “A hotel is easy to get, but it’ll eat up all your money so you can never do anything else.”

‘If I vote for you, are you going to help the homeless?’

Residence as a requirement to vote has always been a part of American history. According to the Gilder Lehman Institute of American History, colonists believed that only those who had a “stake in society” should be granted the right to vote. Largely that meant people who either owned property or paid taxes. For decades after the American Revolution, white landowners were the only ones allowed to vote, and Black Americans were wholly disenfranchised from this opportunity for the country’s first century.

Centuries later, being unhoused continues to make access to voting more difficult.

In Winston-Salem, the afternoon sun beams down on Smiley, an unsheltered man, who is organizing his belongings outside City With Dwellings. He wears sunglasses and a cap and tells TCB that he’s registered to vote at City With Dwellings; the last time he voted was four years ago.

“It’s tough out here,” he says. He needs a stable place to stay. 

“City With Dwellings gives us the help, but housing is the main problem we have out here,” he says.

And that guides his voting decisions.

“If I vote for you, are you going to help the homeless?” he asks. “Are you going to help the less fortunate?” 

In the past few years, the issue of homelessness has become increasingly politicized. In June, the Supreme Court issued an opinion that made it easier for municipalities to fine, ticket and arrest people for sleeping outside. In Greensboro and Winston-Salem, new rules at local parks and bus depots have directly targeted unhoused people.

“This town is not working like it’s supposed to,” Smiley said. “The churches help when they can, but we need the city to help us. We need all the community, we need everybody to chip in.”

Unsheltered voter Malique Hough, who last cast his ballot in November 2022, said that he’s voting for Harris.

“We need somebody who is going to really crack down on some of this stuff, and really be out here and see what’s going on,” Hough said, leaning over a table in front of the Greensboro bus depot. “Thank God she’s on her tour, thank God she’s on the road.”

Hough isn’t happy with local city and county leadership.

“I feel like they’re not helping like they should be. I feel like they should be helping us with housing, helping us with the resources that we need and helping us be placed somewhere permanent,” he says.

How are organizations helping unhoused people vote?

According to City With Dwellings’ Minister of Facilities Nick Childress, affectionately known by guests as “Cowboy,” they’ll be shuttling voters to and from the polls during the early voting period and on Election Day. 

The IRC in Greensboro will be transporting their guests as well.

In an email to TCB, IRC director Kristina Singleton noted how the center offers mail service which allows unhoused people to put them down as an address to register, like Alexis did. They’ve also hosted voter registration onsite at the center in the past, and are in the process of reaching out to arrange that this year.

“We encourage all of our guests to vote,” Singleton wrote.

Ron Schultz and his dog, Hope, sit beneath the doric columns outside the Winston-Salem Journal’s office. Schultz is tall, with a white beard and furrowed brow. He’s been unhoused for two years and has had 20-month-old Hope since she was a tiny puppy. She barely fit in his hand then, he says. 

“Even I have trouble imagining that anymore, as big as she’s gotten.”

Schultz is considering voting via an absentee ballot. 

“Since I’ve been old enough to vote I haven’t missed a presidential election,” he says. “Can’t complain if you don’t vote.”

This will be the first time he’s voted since he’s been unhoused, he said. 

Schultz spent 22 years at an architecture firm that raised some of the city’s memorable buildings into its skyline. His “crown jewel” of his career was Wake Forest University’s Admissions Building and Welcome Center, where he was on the team that oversaw the building’s construction.

Then he took a new job at a different firm that sounded like a great deal. But once he helped them get up and running, they “cut [him] loose,” he says.

“I went from somebody who had a bunch of experience, that a company would love to have, to ‘Well, he’s not working, there must be something wrong with him,’” Schultz explains.

Doors that would have been open to him if he was working and looking for a job were instead closed, he said. So he worked in retail and factories for a couple of years and moved in with his elderly mother, whose home was foreclosed upon after she passed away. It would have been $13,000 to take over the payments. But he didn’t have that.

“When I was working in architecture in a so-called white collar job that would’ve been tough; working in a blue collar job in a factory was impossible,” he says.

He moved into hotels near the airport and did that for “as long as [he] could.”

“It’s a downward slide.” 

He started living on the street, and that made it difficult for him to maintain his job.

But he’s hoping that things are looking up. Earlier that day he’d gotten a “makeover;” a fresh shave at City With Dwellings.

“I feel like things are starting to happen,” Schultz says.

“They want you out of sight, out of mind. But we’re here.”

Those interested can fill out a request for a mail-in absentee ballot now by visiting their local county elections website. The absentee ballot request deadline is at 5 p.m. on Oct. 29. The voter registration deadline is at 5 p.m. on Oct. 11. In-person early voting begins on Oct. 17 and runs through Nov. 2. Election Day is Nov. 5. Early voting locations can be found  here. Those voting on Election Day will need to go to their designated polling place which can be found here.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

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