How Will Hurricane Destruction Hamper Voting In North Carolina?

While recovery efforts continue in western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, state and local election officials are scrambling to find ways to conduct an election — which is fewer than 40 days away — amid the damage, power outages, and lack of internet access in the crucial swing state.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), a Democrat-run institution that has a history of undermining election integrity, met in the past week to lay out initial responses to how the 25 counties and eastern Cherokee tribal areas under disaster declaration can cast ballots.

Overall, 1,275,054 total registered voters in the 25 primarily red counties are affected by the disaster as of Oct. 1, with the largest number of affected affiliated voters (more than 480,000) being Republican. Another nearly half a million voters are unaffiliated, and the area has just under 300,000 registered Democrats, according to the NCSBE.

While certain contingencies and deviations from the norm will likely be required to ensure the deep-red portion of the state can vote, some election integrity leaders in the state are concerned the NCSBE could take advantage of the disaster to circumvent protections for the election.

“[W]e know they can be counted on [to] use the emergency as an excuse to subvert any election integrity safeguards written into the law,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told The Federalist.

According to the NCSBE, election officials are not currently aware of “any situations where voting equipment or printed ballots were lost or damaged.”

The NCSBE has laid out some initial steps for how western North Carolinians can vote. The state allows voters to request absentee ballots for any reason, without excuse, and those in the disaster declaration zone have already requested 38,628 as of Oct. 1, according to data from the NCSBE. So far, only 998 have been returned, leaving a wide margin unaccounted for — and potentially lost in the storm.

However, NCSBE leadership has said that voters in the area who already requested a ballot will not be required to use them and can vote in-person during the early voting period, which starts Oct. 17 and ends Nov. 2. They can also vote in-person on Election Day.

The U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail delivery in “dozens” of post offices across the region, according to the NCSBE, and many residential mailboxes “likely have been washed away by the storm.” NCSBE General Counsel Paul Cox said in a press briefing on Tuesday that voters will now be able to request an absentee ballot in a new location, even if it is in a different county.

“If a person is displaced, they can request an absentee ballot be delivered to their new location,” Cox said. “So for example, if someone had to leave their home in one of the mountain counties, and has moved to another location in a different county, or even in the same county, they can request that their absentee ballot be delivered to that new location.”

“If the person has already requested an absentee ballot, they can change where it’s going to be sent,” Cox continued, noting how, in this case, voters are to “contact their county board of elections, ask them to spoil” — or effectively “delete” — “their current ballot,” and “reissue a ballot to [the] new location.” He indicated a website voters can visit to request absentee ballots.

Normally, North Carolina county elections boards would need to hold meetings “beginning on the fifth Tuesday before Election Day” to review absentee ballots, but the NCSBE passed a draft resolution Monday allowing affected counties to delay those meetings until “practicable.”

Voters in the region will also likely not be required to produce a photo ID when voting, which is normally required both for in-person and mail-in voting. “Under state law,” voters “who cannot provide an acceptable form of ID” when voting can “fill out a Photo ID Exception Form,” the NSCBE clarifies, noting how the ID requirement already includes a contingency permitting an exception for natural disasters that occur “within 100 days of an election.”

“[V]oters in or from the 25 counties under a disaster declaration may use this exception to the photo ID requirement, if they are unable to show ID when voting because of the natural disaster,” according to the NCSBE.

Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, compiled an action proposal for state legislators focused on ensuring that election integrity safeguards are not thrown out with the NCBSE’s response plan.

“[T]he temporary rules applied for the disaster-stricken counties must preserve the security of the voting process with proper checks and oversight,” he wrote in the message to lawmakers obtained by The Federalist:

Here are some election security provisions that should not be compromised in the interest in protecting the overall integrity of the election:  (1) Continue to enforce Voter ID (make provisions for reissuing an ID for those who need one and otherwise require voters to use a provisional ballot as required by law for the reasonable impediment purpose); (2) Do NOT employ dropboxes for gathering ballots in the affected counties (these dropboxes are vulnerable to fraud and do not assure chain of custody of voted ballots); (3) If equipment shortages persist, consider employing the traditional use of paper ballots and employ time-tested methods for hand counting the results, closely observed by partisan observers from both major parties on election night; and (4) Do NOT induce risk of corrupting the vote by extending the times/dates for accepting absentee ballots beyond 7:30PM on election night.   

DeLancy expressed agreement with these proposals from Womack in a statement to The Federalist, but suggested adding “one more action … in light of the USPS decision to halt services.”

“The SBE should ask the postal service to reroute any County Board of Elections mail to the State Board of Elections, so they can process absentee ballots in a timely manner,” he suggested. 

NCSBE Executive Director Karen Bell told members of the media in a Tuesday press call that having adequate communication with poll workers will be a challenge, as cell service and other means of contact with poll workers and county officials are limited. While nothing has been decided yet, Bell also said the NCSBE might soon be considering whether implementing emergency authority to expand who can be a poll worker is warranted. Bell suggested in the briefing it was “too soon to say” if the situation will have a “negative impact” on issues like “the number of [poll] workers,” but expressed confidence in North Carolinians in the affected area and their ability to “answer the call.” (In his proposal, Womack recommended that North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, consider diverting trained workers to the western part of the state, including using North Carolina National Guard personnel to help with the process.)

Some county election offices are currently closed or left with “limited accessibility” due to damage from the hurricane, but the NCSBE has tool kits they call “election offices in a box” county officials can use to set up operations, including absentee ballot request processing and voter registrations. The NCSBE set up a separate page for voters to be “updated routinely” as developments from the situation emerge, including county office closures. The NCSBE also indicated it “will provide regular updates through media interviews, press releases, [and] social media posts.”

Helene is not the first hurricane that has impacted an election in North Carolina. Both Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 affected election operations in the state, though both were Atlantic Coast storms and did not affect the deep red mountain region, which — because it is not typically hit hard by storms of this magnitude — now faces some different logistical challenges.

On the press call, Bell said she remembers having polling locations in tents and other temporary facilities in the fallout of previous storms and seemed to suggest such options are not off the table in 2024, either.

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.