How will Helene impact the presidential election in North Carolina?
“To be determined” is the simple answer.
Hurricane Helene has upset many residents’ fall plans in western North Carolina, among which are plans for early voting set to begin on October 17. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is urging the annual inmigration of fall “leaf peepers” to stay home and away from the disaster area. Local businesses who count on that trade may not have beds or power or water for them anyway. Hotels are filled with relief workers or people whose homes are unlivable or gone. Local election boards will have to alter election plans that under normal circumstances are unalterable once submitted and approved by the state’s Board of Elections in August.
Permisssion for altering the unalterable came on Monday (Democracy Docket):
The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) unanimously passed a resolution Monday allowing special accommodations for voters in the 13 counties most impacted by Hurricane Helene.
Karen Brinson Bell, NCSBE’s executive director, began the Monday morning meeting with a status update.
“What a difference a week makes,” Brinson Bell said. “When we were last together to consider the emergency authority regarding absentee board meeting schedules for these affected counties, we were looking at 14 offices that could still not open for work or to the public, and today, all county offices are open in North Carolina, and this is just quite the feat.”
However, she said many voters and election workers still face numerous struggles in the storm’s aftermath. One of the board members, Stacy Eggers IV, said that he has visited five of the counties impacted and has seen the damage firsthand.
“These areas received over 20 inches of rain in less than about 36 hours,” Eggers said. “As of today, we still have over 100,000 North Carolinians without power. Communication is significantly limited, and our roads remain in a crippled state.”
The five-member board determined that in multiple western North Carolina counties — Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey — the “infrastructure for elections administration and voters’ accessibility to polling places and mail service” was “severely disrupted as a result of the disaster.”
Therefore, the board members passed a resolution to allow election boards in these counties to make changes with a “bipartisan majority vote.”
They can amend their early voting plans — like adding or removing voting sites and changing hours or days that sites are open — and modify their Election Day polling places.
On Nov. 5, these counties can establish voting sites for a precinct outside of the actual precinct. If a county doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate an Election Day site in a certain precinct, they can create a site in a different area or county for their voters to go to.
Also, the election boards in these counties can bring in election officials and poll workers who are registered voters and residents of other North Carolina counties.
Additionally, county boards can make accommodations for absentee voters. They can process absentee ballot requests until the day before Election Day. Without this change, the request deadline would’ve been Oct. 29.
Under the proposal, voters in these counties can now hand-deliver their absentee ballots to any Election Day voting site by 7:30 p.m. that day. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to submit them to their county’s election office.
Voters can also return their ballots to a different North Carolina county’s election board by 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 if they were displaced to another county after the storm.
Only two of those 13 are “blue counties” (Buncombe and Watauga). The rest are pretty solidly red, and their combined populations are over 100,000 more than the blues. Republicans in Raleigh could balk at plans that would allow Buncombe (Asheville) and Watauga (Boone, Appalachian State) flexibility for citizens to access voting sites post-Helene, but they could be shooting themselves in the foot to try.
Of course, voters here in Asheville will crawl over broken glass to vote beginning next week (as many as possible on Day1, please). Fourteen early voting sites were planned in Buncombe County. How many remain in operational condition and accessible after the flooding is under review. Some of the 80 Election Day precincts may have to be moved or combined. Giving advance notice to voters (given that informational literature is already printed) will prove a challenge, but there are still weeks to tackle that problem. Buncombe’s local Board will meet today to draft Plan B.
What’s not clear is what happens in other counties. Watauga (which saw extensive flooding) planned for five EV sites. The rest of the 13 have two EV sites at best.
Democrats’ plans for seeing North Carolina go blue could turn on voting access here in the west and on which voters can and cannot access voting by Nov. 5