Swing states scramble to keep elections on track in hurricanes’ wake

Yancey County Elections Director Mary Beth Tipton has had a brutal few weeks.

Mrs. Tipton had joked to colleagues before Hurricane Helene hit that it would take a “Noah’s Ark”-sized storm to damage her property – then watched the waters rise in her front yard until they were lapping at her house’s foundation. Her office was forced shut for more than a week in the middle of election season. Roads were impassable.

When she finally got back into the office early this week and first saw her co-workers, she was overcome with emotion. “I lost it. We all did,” she says.

Many of her neighbors have it far worse. Her Appalachian community, north of Asheville deep in the mountains, was one of those hit hardest by the storm. At least 10 people died in the lightly populated county, and 80 others died around the state. Her husband, a semiretired detective, spent the days after the storm working with the county sheriff’s office on search-and-rescue operations, before pivoting to dog teams searching for those who died. Her neighbors are scattered across the state and country – she has heard from voters as far away as Minnesota and Florida, where one voter told her they were preparing to evacuate once again before Hurricane Milton made landfall.

As her community reels, she’s doing everything she can to make sure they don’t lose anything more.

“These voters need to vote. People have lost everything. They’ve lost family. The last thing I want them to lose is their voice,” Mrs. Tipton says.

Hurricane season has put immense pressure on voters and election workers already facing an extraordinary amount of stress and logistical hurdles in the crucial swing states of North Carolina and Georgia – and will likely lead to depressed voter turnout that could potentially swing a close presidential election. Untold numbers of people have been forced from their homes, and election workers are scrambling to get polling locations back online while dealing with challenging situations in their own lives.

And things weren’t so easy before the storm, either. Officials in both North Carolina and Georgia are grappling with last-minute election rule changes and delays. And the onslaught of election-related conspiracy theories since 2020 has led to verbal abuse and death threats against nonpartisan election workers that have intensified in the wake of the storms.

Florida, which was also affected by Helene, is just now emerging from underneath Hurricane Milton. Millions of people in the Tampa Bay area were under mandatory evacuation orders, one of the largest evacuations in recent Florida history. About 3 million people lost power in the state.

Hurricane Helene’s effect on North Carolina voting sites

In North Carolina, 14 county election offices are still without water. Some early-voting sites won’t be usable because of damage from the storm; other early-voting sites, like local fire stations, are now being used for recovery efforts, or repurposed as shelters and warehouses for supplies. North Carolina officials are still figuring out how many of the 270 Election Day voting sites in the hardest-hit 13 counties will be usable, and how many they’ll need to close or combine with other sites.

In Yancey County alone, all 11 Election Day voting sites are no longer options. Half the building of one elementary school is gone, while another polling place was “completely washed away,” Mrs. Tipton says. One middle school that was supposed to be a voting site is a shelter for displaced people; all the fire stations that double as polling places have been repurposed for emergency response and distribution of supplies.

It’s now nearly a two-hour drive on back roads to reach one corner of the county because the interstate was wiped out, so Mrs. Tipton is pushing to have a voting site just over the state line in Tennessee so those residents can cast their ballots. She plans to head out in an ATV with emergency management officials next week to survey other locations where the Federal Emergency Management Agency can set up tents for voting – but she wants to keep them as close as possible to the original sites to make them easy to find.

“We have no cellphone service, no television, no internet, nothing, so I have to keep it as close to normal for my voters,” she says.

She’s also rushing to replace mail ballots lost or damaged by the hurricane and get mail ballots out to her voters, wherever they may be.

More than 1.2 million registered voters live in the 25 North Carolina counties affected by the storm – roughly 17% of the state’s total electorate.

In North Carolina, new steps to make voting easier

The North Carolina State Board of Elections unanimously passed an emergency resolution on Monday to make it easier to vote in the 13 counties most damaged by the storm. The biggest change is allowing people to hand-deliver their mail ballot anywhere in the state. (They’d previously been required to turn them in at their own county election offices.)

Counties short on poll workers to run the elections can now recruit people from other parts of the state to work the polls. On Wednesday, the North Carolina legislature approved $5 million in emergency funding for the 25 counties impacted by the storm.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to accommodate the voters, and somewhat take voting to the voters – because they may be isolated, they may be having difficulties getting out of their homes or out of their communities to come to the county seats,” Karen Brinson Bell, the director of the State Board of Elections, said at a Monday press conference.

Conspiracy theorists have made their jobs even harder. False online claims that the storms were engineered by the government to steal homes and resources from North Carolinians, and that the FEMA was involved, got so much attention that Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards put out a lengthy statement debunking those claims. And conspiracy theorists attacked the North Carolina election board’s efforts to accommodate storm-affected voters – many of whom are registered Republicans – as an attempt to boost voter fraud.

“It is not helpful. As a matter of fact, it is a disservice to these people who have already faced disaster and have been put in harm’s way and are hurting. What a disgrace for anyone to try to provide misinformation or disinformation affecting their ability to vote,” Ms. Bell said.

Things aren’t quite as dire in Georgia – but election officials there are still dealing with unprecedented challenges, from power outages to road delays.

“Not in my 58 years of living here have I ever seen that type of mass destruction and devastation,” says Richmond County Elections Supervisor Travis Doss in Augusta.

Sandy to Michael: How other storms have affected voter turnout

Hurricane season comes right before U.S. elections, and Helene and Milton are far from the first hurricanes to affect the vote.

Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeastern United States just a week before the 2012 election, leaving a swath of devastation in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York as well as flooding in parts of eastern Pennsylvania. Turnout dipped significantly in those states. New Jersey, which saw the most widespread damage, saw its total 2012 statewide turnout drop by nearly 6 percentage points from 2008, three times the nationwide turnout dip. Ocean and Monmouth Counties, two coastal areas hit hard by the storm, both saw total turnout drop by more than 8%. An academic study found that voter turnout dropped the most in the precincts most affected by the storm.

Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle on Oct. 10, 2018. Its aftermath, combined with an executive order from then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott to loosen voting laws while consolidating polling locations in the eight counties most affected by the storm, limiting where people could cast their votes, saw a 7% decline in voter turnout, according to one academic study. That means about 13,000 fewer total votes, in a year where the races for both U.S. Senate and governor were decided by around 10,000 votes. In 2022, after Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis used his emergency powers to allow three counties – all Republican strongholds – to consolidate polling places, extend early voting, and loosen rules around mail ballot requests.

Governor DeSantis has already granted the 13 northern Florida counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene greater flexibility in sending out mail ballots and changing in-person voting sites, and has indicated that counties affected by Hurricane Milton will get similar treatment.

Even if officials find ways to make the voting systems fully operational, it doesn’t mean people whose lives have been upended by the storms will be able to vote.

“On the hard infrastructure, they do have good resiliency plans, but with respect to enabling access to the ballot, it’s not as strong,” Amy Keith, the Florida executive director of the good-government group Common Cause, said on a press call this week. “Where we’re seeing the weaknesses is really on accommodating individual voters, within the context of a disaster, to be able to access their ballot, register to vote, and make their vote heard.”

Florida election officials will soon face similar challenges as those faced by their colleagues to the north.

“This disaster is not just affecting how we conduct elections. It’s affecting day-to-day life,” said Ms. Bell. Many of these North Carolina communities will be without power, water, internet, or cellphone service for weeks or even months. “Our job is to figure out, as long as there are citizens in those communities, how do we provide them with voting opportunities so that they can exercise their right to vote?”