Helene’s devastation has disrupted voting in battlegrounds

The Category 4 hurricane that ripped through the eastern seaboard is scrambling election preparations in some of the country’s top battlegrounds — adding to the troubles of administering the vote amid conspiracy theories and toxic partisan divides.

The swing states of Georgia and North Carolina were among the most heavily affected by Hurricane Helene, which flooded towns, destroyed buildings, took out power and cell service and forced widespread road closures, with a death toll that has already ticked above 200. The upturning of everyday life has also introduced unanticipated disruptions into the nuts-and-bolts of running a high-stakes presidential election.

Now, election officials are racing to ensure storm-battered residents can safely cast their votes over the next month.

The officials say they are still assessing the full extent of the disruption and just how much they will need to shift course due to Helene. What is already clear one week into the recovery effort: The deadly storm is compounding the intense pressures confronting election officials in the final sprint to Election Day.

Officials in North Carolina and Georgia have projected confidence about their ability to adapt to the ravages of Helene without accidentally disenfranchising voters. Early indications are that key election equipment such as ballots and voting machines were largely unaffected by the storm, avoiding a major last-minute logistical nightmare. But the mounting to-do list is daunting.

Counties affected by the storm are now revisiting some of the most basic elements of their Election Day plans at an especially busy moment in the electoral calendar, with fast-approaching deadlines for voter registration and the printing and delivery of mail ballots, and the onset of early voting. That includes how to process absentee ballots for displaced voters who cannot yet return home and vetting whether polling locations battered by the storm will be safe to receive voters as soon as early polling locations open this month.

In some particularly hard hit counties, the list runs the gamut from restoring power, internet and water to election offices to accounting for missing employees or their family members.

“It’s brutal,” said Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. In a tense election year already marred by late spats over election rules and whether to include third-party candidates on the ballot, election officials are “now dealing with the fact that their homes are gone, and they don’t have water,” Cohen said.

The hurricane, she continued, “is certainly not what we needed, but it’s what we got, so we’ll make it work.”

North Carolina: ‘Like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes’

Roughly one-fifth of North Carolina voters live in areas battered by Helene, according to state voter registration statistics . Fourteen county election offices in the state were closed for the near-term as of Tuesday, according to Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

“This level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting,” Brinson Bell told reporters during a press briefing. The storm “is like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina.”

Brinson Bell said the Board of Elections is working with the state’s emergency management agency, the national guard and federal partners like the U.S. Postal Service to ensure all voters meet the state’s Oct. 11 registration deadline and the Oct. 29 deadline to request absentee ballots.

Still, the damage she recounted was extensive, leaving her teary-eyed at one point during the briefing.

Some of North Carolina’s election workers “still don't have contact with family members,” Brinson Bell said. “They're facing damages, some total losses of their own personal properties.”

In Georgia, a race to get election offices back up and running

In Georgia, top election officials have been in “constant contact” with the Georgia Emergency Management agency, county officials and other federal partners since the storm, said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Secretary of State’s office.

Sterling said his biggest concern at this point is restoring power, internet connectivity and road access to election facilities so they can continue processing voter registration changes and absentee ballot requests.

The Secretary of State’s office is also readying back-up plans in case the U.S. Postal Service is unable to deliver absentee ballots on time to some parts of the state — a situation that potentially affects a “small but not insignificant percentage of voters,” according to an internal analysis Sterling ran.

“We feel pretty good, but we are just praying for North Carolina right now,” he said.

No election offices in Georgia were permanently leveled by the storm, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on social media . But some are still experiencing substantial disruptions.

Travis Doss, the executive director of the Richmond County Board of Elections, one of the worst hit parts of Georgia, said the county is largely without power, internet access is spotty, and there are trees strewn across most roadways.

Doss said he is reviewing whether the county’s three early polling locations will be safe by Oct. 15. But his most immediate concern is processing voter registrations and absentee ballots in time given the constraints on his staff, who still lack power and water.

“We’re all without showers, and it’s the South, so we don’t have air conditioning at our home,” he said. “No one is feeling our best right now, but without hesitation everyone did come in.”

Helene disrupts election prep further afield

Hurricane Helene also brought powerful winds and a massive storm surge to parts of Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, destroying or severely damaging homes and polling places.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed an executive order granting relief to election officials in more than a dozen impacted counties in Florida’s Big Bend region and along the Gulf Coast.

“We are all systems go on everything we can do to be helpful,” DeSantis said Thursday during a media briefing on Anna Maria Island. “We also think the elections are going to go fine.”

Back in 2022, DeSantis used his emergency power to similarly let three southwest Florida counties make changes in the aftermath of a major hurricane. Election officials can now more easily consolidate or move polling places and send mail ballots to addresses that weren’t initially on file for voters.

Some of the changes — such as creating super voting centers — have been rejected by the Florida Legislature in the past. In recent years Republican legislators have tightened laws about drop boxes and vote-by-mail ballots amid the conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump.

Helene is unlikely to significantly shift the results

The electoral effects of potential decreased turnout in the affected regions are muddled, even in what is expected to be a very close election.

Consider the counties covered by Biden’s major disaster declaration. There are more than two dozen such counties in North Carolina, which together accounted for about 950,000 votes in 2020 — or 17 percent of the total votes cast in the state that year. The region favors Republicans, but not overwhelmingly — so while any decrease in turnout would likely mean a drop in GOP vote, overall turnout would have to plummet by nearly one-third across the entire area to have flipped North Carolina’s presidential result in 2020, when Trump won the state by less than 1.4 points.

In Georgia, the more than three dozen counties that fell under the federal disaster declaration account for only 13 percent of the ballots cast in the state four years ago.

In Buncombe County, North Carolina — where the Democratic stronghold of Asheville is located — Democratic County Chair Kathie Kline said the party’s biggest concern is whether polling places will be safe and accessible.

Many of the county’s 14 early voting sites are located in schools, which are closed indefinitely. Kline said she is working to spread the message that voters can still receive absentee ballots if they’re living in a temporary situation, an accommodation she fears is widely unknown.

“I am very concerned that North Carolina could lose,” Kline said. “We were feeling pretty confident we were going to turn blue this year, but because of the storm, we’re less convinced that we’re going to have that positive impact at the polls.”

But Kline said she didn’t want to give the impression that Democrats in Asheville, which historically has high turnout, have given up. “We’re very concerned but we’re doubly determined as well,” she said.

Gary Fineout contributed to this report.