Are Dems Slow-Walking Hurricane Relief To Suppress GOP Votes?

Early voting in North Carolina starts in just days, and Appalachian voters in the western, deep-red stronghold of the state are still desperate for help with basic necessities after destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene. A slow-rolled disaster relief response from federal and state government agencies has many wondering if the Democrats in charge are trying to suppress the votes of the predominantly Trump-supporting region.

“As rescuing survivors and repairing damage continues in North Carolina, the alarming lack of state-level adjustment regarding the conduct of this year’s election has begun to appear intentional on the part of Democrat Governor Cooper and his allies,” a press release from the Election Transparency Initiative, run by former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, stated.

The vast majority of the 28 counties and tribal areas included in the emergency declaration are Republican strongholds, and the voters there can make or break a win for former President Donald Trump in the tight swing state he only carried by about 75,000 votes in 2020.

According to an analysis by The Federalist, 604,119 voters in the emergency declaration region cast their ballots for Trump in 2020, while 356,902 chose President Joe Biden. That 247,217-vote difference is more than three times Trump’s margin of victory in 2020.

Trump voters in the affected region also made up 10.9 percent of the total 5,545,848 votes cast in 2020, and the average county voter participation rate is 77.3 percent.

Voter suppression in the disaster zone could be catastrophic for the Trump campaign, and the malaise shown by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cooper, and the Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) raises significant questions about a life-threatening power play from Democrats and deliberate election interference in order to carry the state for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

“Officials are not making important decisions and then publishing relevant information to educate citizens about how they can vote,” Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told The Federalist in a statement. “State and federal authorities are tediously slow in surveying the damaged facilities and in training replacement election officials so we can experience a free and fair election in which everyone from the disaster-ravaged areas has the opportunity to vote.”

Democrats are also well-aware of the advantage they have.

Earlier this week, David Axelrod, an influential Democrat insider and former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, said the quiet part out loud, acknowledging that Helene victims are primarily Trump supporters and that the main Democrat stronghold in the region, Buncombe County — which contains Asheville — is made up of “upscale, kinda liberal voters, and they’re probably going to figure out a way to vote.”

“I’m not sure a bunch of these folks who had their homes and lives destroyed elsewhere, in western North Carolina, in the mountains there, are going to be as easy to wrangle for the Trump campaign,” Axelrod added.

As The Federalist reported, election integrity advocates in the state are concerned that the Democrat-run institutions in charge of overseeing the election are well-positioned to take advantage of emergency powers. Already, state election officials have suggested that voters should bypass state voter identification laws by filling out an ID exception form.

North Carolinians can vote by mail for any reason, and in the affected area, nearly 40,000 absentee ballots have already been sent, but voters have returned fewer than 1,500. That leaves a major deficit of unaccounted-for ballots in the area equaling about half of the Trump margin of victory in 2020. State officials have already told voters who have requested absentee ballots that they will be able to vote in person instead.

Womack said that, naturally, the top priority of those devastated by Helene is not voting, but rather essentials like caring for family and securing food, water, shelter, and electricity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there were still 295,514 power outages in the region as of Oct. 3.

The more prolonged the recovery process is, the longer voting continues to be a back-burner concern. The likelihood that Democrats can sweep North Carolina by suppressing recovery efforts, and therefore the vote, also grows.

“Our North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT) group has hundreds of election observers and poll workers in the affected western counties. Many have checked in and expressed concern that the state Board of Elections is slow and generally disengaged, given that a week has passed since the storm and there has been little relevant information provided to voters and local offices,” Womack said. “The state Board of Elections has only held one emergency meeting and no major decisions were made about the upcoming election.”

“Some towns and villages, like Chimney Rock in Rutherford County, are completely devastated and most of their voting-age citizens have been relocated,” he added. “They will have a difficult time getting to an authorized voting location. With postal services discontinued indefinitely across dozens of post offices, voting by mail will be difficult if not impossible.”

Cuccinelli’s ETI pointed out reports coming out of western North Carolina nursing homes concerned about relocated seniors’ abilities to vote. The group also says the number and locations of pre-approved voting sites in the affected counties is unknown, and that state law requires the NCSBE to approve new locations.

Further, state officials have yet to provide a solution to the U.S. Postal Service mail delivery suspensions in the area, which ETI notes “completely disrupts voting by mail.”

“America has learned a great deal about how best to execute an election following a natural disaster in the nearly 20 years since Katrina struck. While several of North Carolina’s neighboring states have moved to implement those lessons, North Carolina’s Governor Cooper has been shockingly inactive, as have his allies on the State Board,” Cuccinelli said in a statement. “We call on Gov. Cooper and the State Board to stop stalling and start working to ensure that those communities already devastated by Helene at least have their voice through their votes in this year’s election. Every day in which Gov. Cooper continues to stall ensures his suppression of the votes of his fellow Tarheels.”

To make matters worse, as my colleague M.D. Kittle wrote, amid the death and destruction in western North Carolina, FEMA’s response has been lackluster at best, and the federal disaster relief agency is running out of money.

In response to the reports of an absent FEMA in North Carolina, instead of expanding their efforts, the federal agency created a “rumor response” page to confront what it calls “disinformation.”

Well, it’s a fact and not just a rumor that the Biden-Harris FEMA spent more than $1 billion on illegal aliens, rendering the agency incapable of responding adequately to the needs of American citizens.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.