There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state with 1.3 percent in 2020his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.
“Kamala Harris is winning North Carolina, she’s the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week.
Then Hurricane Helene etched a 500-mile path of destruction through the southeastern United States, at least 139 people killed in six states and caused over $100 billion in damagesaccording to preliminary estimates.
In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dumping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or wiped off the map by floods and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until Nov. 5, thousands of people displaced, postal service closed or restricted in many zip codes, and many roads closed, officials are now scrambling to figure out how to handle voice in the midst of disaster.
“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetime in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top elections officials, told reporters Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty so close to election day is terrifying.”
The delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina has already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last-minute lawsuit to remove his name from millions of already printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: the voter registration deadline in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the necessary measures to ensure that voting takes place,” said Brinson Bell. But there are countless issues to resolve first, and government officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused.
“There’s a range of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the Board of Elections for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh.
Right now, the central logistical problem is that the US Postal Service has suspended service in much of Western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored — damage is so bad in some zip codes that it could be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that some postal workers in rural areas use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm.
“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impact,” a Postal Service spokesperson told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local electoral boards in affected areas to ensure the continued transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”
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Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must return these ballots in time to reach the polling offices by 7.30pm on election day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Electoral Council is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There is also no way to track where the absentee ballots that counties have already sent out have ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.
And then there is the issue of personal voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there were no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There could be polling places affected by mudslides, there could be polling places inaccessible due to damaged roads, there could be polling places with trees down on them,” Brinson Bell said. It is not yet known how many of the people who will be manning these polling stations have been displaced, injured or killed by the storm.
Each county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and currently the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, especially smaller ones.
“The smaller counties only had one location for early voting, and that’s usually at the board of elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”
Cohen said he has heard that the North Carolina legislature, which convenes next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help those counties set up new polling places and train replacement poll workers. . He believes the state can still run a robust election if it provides proper support to local election boards — in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”
But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people affected by a historic and deadly flooding event usually don’t think about where they’ll cast their ballots — they focus on locating their loved ones, their homes spills, finding new housing, filing insurance claims and dozens of other priorities that trump voice.
The State Board of Elections in North Carolina have a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their postal ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, Wi-Fi and cellphone service.
For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene undermining a national election. “Hurricane season in the US – between June and November each year – usually coincides with the election season,” a recent report said by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA. “The chance of hurricanes disrupting US elections is ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.”
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Before Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018 and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can drop sharply during these events.
“The biggest challenge we see is not just technological failure, but a decline in public trust,” Vasu Mohan, a senior adviser at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, it’s extremely difficult to make accommodations at the last minute.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it is possible to keep elections fair after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need.
“I am very, very concerned about how [the storm] will affect voice,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, who was not seriously damaged by the storm. Werner and her partner are Democrats, and make a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of concerns, this is an additional wave,” she said.
Brinson Bell’s office is likely to face a flurry of lawsuits over its handling of post-storm voting — it is already navigating a lawsuit filed by Republican groups before the storm over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But she said the COVID-19 pandemic and past storms have prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We had an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the COVID pandemic,” she said. “We battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do it again.”
