Poll Volunteers Accuse Rep. Erin Paré and Husband Wayne of Intimidation at Early Voting Sites

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Happy Halloween! Early voting is underway, and you can find all of the INDY’s election coverage here. Our questionnaires for candidates running in local races in Wake, Orange, and Durham counties, and for state house and senate seats in Triangle districts, are live and will continue to be updated. We’ll be reporting up to Election Day on November 5 and after and plan to bring you coverage on state constitutional amendments, candidate visits, and more. Send us your election thoughts, questions, and concerns and we’ll try to get you answers promptly. 

Good morning, readers.

Andrea Biondi spent the 2022 election cycle volunteering for the Democratic Party and the North Carolina Association of Educators. During early voting, she logged many hours each week at the polls in southern Wake County, speaking with voters and encouraging them to support Democratic- and NCAE-endorsed candidates. 

Biondi was a seasoned poll greeter with many elections under her belt, who’d gone through the NC Democratic Party’s de-escalation training for volunteers. But she said none of it prepared her for the harassment she faced at the polls that year from Wayne Paré, husband of Republican state representative Erin Paré. 

“His body language was confrontational,” Biondi recalls. “He would stand so close to you that you’d want to move, but if you moved then you’d lose your spot on the one section of sidewalk that was open. At one point I could actually feel him over my left shoulder, that’s how close he was to me.”

During early voting in 2022, Biondi says Wayne Paré stood behind her and held a clipboard over her head with a sign that read “She just told a lie about my wife. Please ask me for the truth.” The INDY viewed a photograph of Wayne holding the clipboard sign printed with those words. One day at the polls, Paré allegedly held a bell next to Biondi’s ear and rang it every time she tried to speak to a voter. (Wayne Paré didn’t respond to the INDY’s requests for comment, and Rep. Paré declined to comment.)

According to Biondi, this was not a one-off incident, nor was Biondi the only target. Rather, her experiences fit into a pattern of reported intimidation and harassment of poll greeters by Wayne and Erin Paré over the 2020, 2022, and 2024 election cycles. 

The INDY spoke to six people and viewed complaints from eight more who described Wayne or Erin Paré harassing or intimidating them or other poll greeters—mostly women—at polling sites in 2020, 2022, and 2024. 

Read the full story here.

 —Chloe

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