Helene’s Floods Upend Voting in Key Battleground of North Carolina

(Bloomberg) — The unprecedented flooding caused by Hurricane Helene as it barreled into western North Carolina, washing away homes, roads and entire towns, is already disrupting voting there and injecting new uncertainty into the state’s high-stakes elections.
Helene’s death toll has now topped 130, and almost a third of those killed were in North Carolina’s Buncombe County, home to the city of Asheville. With the status of polling places in the region unclear and thousands of residents displaced, “it is going to take a proactive and strong response from the State Board of Elections and General Assembly to ensure” access to voting, said Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina.
Election officials don’t yet know how many early voting sites and precinct locations were damaged or destroyed in the western part of the state. They also don’t know how many of the people who signed up to work at the polls have had to relocate or were otherwise so affected by the storm that they may not show up. 
“There may be polling places affected by mudslides. There may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads. There may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, in a call with reporters on Tuesday. She said a fuller assessment will be possible by the middle or end of the week. 
At an emergency meeting of the election board on Monday, Bell said the board will strive “to do everything possible to ensure every eligible North Carolina voter can cast their ballot.”
A lot is at stake in the state’s elections this year. North Carolina exerts outsized influence over who will end up in the White House. Nowhere is more of a toss-up: The latest polling shows Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are effectively tied. State residents are also set to elect a new governor, in the nation’s only Democratic-held governorship up for election this year. A recent bombshell report by CNN, which details offensive comments allegedly made by the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, has thrown that race into chaos. 
Complicating matters further, the state’s highest court last month ordered election officials to remove former presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the ballot, delaying the printing and disruption of ballots by weeks.
The timing of the storm’s strike only compounded the delay. Some 250,000 absentee ballot requests have been made across the state, with roughly 10,000 just in the Asheville region, according to Bob Phillips, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause North Carolina. Some of those ballots had only just been delivered or were in the mail when Helene rammed through.
“You just don’t know how many of those ballots literally had been in the mailbox of a house on Thursday or Friday when the storm hit,” Phillips said.
Helene has disrupted mail service in parts of the state. The United States Postal Service on Sunday announced it was suspending operations in multiple Zip codes in the Asheville region, and more than 30 post offices in western North Carolina have been closed.
People tend to think of elections as occurring on a single day, but that’s not the case, said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Voter Project, which works to boost voter turnout among environmentalists. Voting actually begins weeks to months in advance of Election Day itself, meaning this storm didn’t hit “before the election, but right in the middle,” he said.  
Election officials know they are on the clock. But they don’t have a lot of time to figure things out. North Carolina’s voter registration deadline is Oct. 11, early voting begins on Oct. 17 and lasts until Nov. 2 and absentee ballots are due on Nov. 5, Election Day.
Steps taken by North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature to restrict voting may hamper disaster victims, Klein noted. For example, whereas absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day in 2020 had a three-day grace period to be received and counted, state politicians have since gotten rid of that grace period. 
When disaster strikes, “it can cause voters to participate in elections at a lower rate,” said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. But past disasters show election officials can get creative to help ensure this doesn’t happen. 
After Hurricane Dorian hit North Carolina in 2019, state emergency managers and the National Guard helped stand up temporary polling sites. Harris County, Texas, set up drive-through voting in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. New Jersey and New York opened mobile polling stations in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The question is whether state election officials and the legislature embrace this type of flexibility. If they don’t, Republicans may have more to lose, Phillips noted: 23 of the 25 counties hit hardest by the storm and designated to get federal disaster assistance are overwhelmingly Republican and voted for Trump in 2020. 
The state election board’s general counsel, Paul Cox, said Tuesday that residents displaced by the storm can request that an absentee ballot be delivered to their location, even if that’s in a different county from where they’re registered. 
Bell, the election board director, said the timing could have been worse. “Unlike some of our colleagues who had to administer elections through Hurricane Sandy, which was just a week before an election,” she said, “we’ve got a little more runway to be able to assist people and to recognize that we’ve got multiple communities facing different challenges.”
–With assistance from Matthew Griffin.
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