How do you vote if the roads are washed out? North Carolina officials are ready for a post-disaster election

When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, it destroyed homes, washed out roads and bridges, and displaced thousands of residents. It also damaged polling centers—where just a few weeks later North Carolina residents would start early voting—and forced some in those communities to leave the counties they’d expected to vote in.

Increasingly, climate disasters are becoming another disruption election workers have to plan for—just like inclement weather, technological issues, or something as random as a burst pipe at a polling place. Officials who run elections across the country know they have to ensure voter access after such disasters, even as communities are still cleaning up and residents are rebuilding their lives.

“These kinds of events, whether hurricanes in the Southeast or wildfires in the West—election officials are expecting these. These are not new to them,” says Christopher Mann, research director at the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that works with election officials to build confidence and trust in elections. That doesn’t mean they’re not still a cause for concern. “It is disruptive to the process,” he adds “[but] there’s a great deal of resiliency in our election system.”

Restoring North Carolina voting access

Early voting in North Carolina, which began October 17, is underway. There’s already been record-setting turnout across the state. Though many residents likely didn’t think about the election right after the storm—preoccupied instead with accessing food and water and navigating destroyed roads—they’re showing up now.

In North Carolina, 76 out of 80 early voting sites in the 25-county Western North Carolina disaster area opened as planned. The State Board of Elections and the Army National Guard have been working together to make sure voting is still accessible for residents. While the state was prepared for the National Guard to set up tents as makeshift polling places, as it has done after previous hurricanes, officials said they ended up not needing as many because regular polling places were able to open. The state elections board says they believe about a half dozen tents total will be needed in three counties.

That preparation emphasizes how this isn’t new for election workers. Though the damage to western North Carolina was rare, the state broadly has dealt with storms before. When Hurricane Florence hit the eastern part of the Carolinas in September 2018, Mann says election officials in the western part of the state helped those eastern counties prepare and react.

That can mean moving polling places, communicating changes to voters, mailing out new ballots, and even working with the legislature to make rules more flexible. If there’s a rule that says poll workers should work in the same communities in which they live, for example, that could be adjusted so that volunteers from other counties can fill in for workers still dealing with the disaster. Rules about turning in mail-in ballots in the county in which you live are also being adjusted, allowing residents to drop their ballot off to any election office. “It means people who evacuated still have the option,” Mann notes.

After Hurricane Helene, the roles were reversed. “As the hurricane was coming, and in the wake, election officials from eastern North Carolina were calling up their counterparts in western North Carolina saying, ‘Let me know what I can do to help,’” Mann says. They talked about what they learned from the last storm, and had meetings to prepare.

Ensuring voter access after a climate disaster

The conversations about how to adjust after a disaster are happening among election officials across the country. And they’re leading to concrete changes that help ensure elections run smoothly no matter what happens. After both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton hit Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order allowing election supervisors to make “modest but reasonable” accommodations if their voting sites were damaged. That includes moving or consolidating polling places, and loosening mail-in ballot restrictions.

A federal judge denied a call to reopen voter registration in Georgia, which was also hit by Helene, but that state, like others, is adjusting polling places and working closely with the post office to track mail-in ballots that may be delayed. It’s also allowing displaced voters to request a new ballot be mailed to their new location (as are other states). “That flexibility of people being able to vote in different ways makes it much easier to be resilient,” Mann says.

Keeping voting accessible is key to our democracy. “Just because people are impacted by this type of disaster, they should still have their voice heard,” Mann adds. “We don’t want anyone of any party disenfranchised from voting from any office, from the president down to the school board.”

When polling places are prepared, there’s rarely evidence of a drop off in voter participation. That’s already proving true with North Carolina’s voter turnout; state election officials say more than 353,000 votes were cast on its first day of voting. Georgia also reported that on its first day of voting, October 15, voters turned out in record numbers with more than 300,000 casting their ballots.

Securing elections from future climate disasters

As climate change worsens, disruptions from natural disasters will likely become more common. And while major storms are an extreme example, disruptions have been happening forever. “The mechanisms that have been developed for decades for dealing with those kinds of things, that’s the wealth of experience [election officials are] drawing on in 2024,” Mann says.

A recent Brookings Institute blog emphasized the need for emergency voting solutions after disasters, and added that such solutions “must be accompanied by a long-term strategy to protect Americans’ political rights in the difficult years and decades to come.”

When it comes to what voters should know in the wake of climate disasters, Mann emphasizes that they should look at their local election board website for what changes have been made or what voting options are available; he cautions not to trust posts on social media that may have misinformation.

And for voters outside of the impacted areas, “be patient and mindful,” he says, because changes to deal with a disruption might mean results don’t come in as quickly. “That is normal,” he says. “There is lots of experience and lots of procedures and lots of safeguards to make sure we make modest but reasonable changes so that everybody has the opportunity to vote and the elections are secure and transparent.”