The Hurricanes Are Going to Keep Hitting During Election Season

Early voting opened in North Carolina on October 17, three weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the state. According to state election officials, 76 out of 80 early voting sites opened in the 25 counties hardest hit by the storm. “It might require a generator. It might require a porta-potty, but we are getting those sites open,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told reporters before early voting started. In about a week, more than 1.3 million North Carolinians statewide have mailed in their ballots or voted early in-person. 

A lot of the credit goes to election officials. In North Carolina, the bipartisan state board unanimously approved emergency measures to facilitate voting for Helene victims, including allowing local election boards to modify polling places, extending ways voters could obtain and return absentee ballots, and giving election officials more options to recruit poll workers. Local election officials, who live and work in disaster zones, needed to assess damage to polling sites and local offices, and had to figure out how to get electricity to polling sites and how to communicate with voters whose phone lines are down.  

“You wouldn’t believe the people that’s come through here today that’s said, ‘I don’t have a home,’ but they’re here to vote,” Mary Beth Tipton, the elections director in North Carolina’s Yancey County, north of Asheville, told NPR, about the early vote in her badly wrecked community. “This is one thing that we’re not taking away from them. We’re going to see to it that they do get to vote.” 

North Carolina is no stranger to hurricanes, including around elections, but Helene was a reminder that climate change is making these storms more intense and unpredictable. That requires adaptation and resilience – and that includes the political infrastructure of voting systems. America’s election season coincides with an increasingly potent Atlantic hurricane season in a warming world. Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which hit the U.S.’s east coast a week before election day and left election officials scrambling, was a profound wake-up call on the need to protect elections from extreme weather events. There have been election-season hurricanes since, but those are not the only natural-(ish) disasters that threaten people’s ability and access to vote. In the past five years, 26 countries have had elections disrupted by natural hazards, from wildfires to floods to earthquakes. 

Despite this looming hellscape, there is a sliver of good news: the practices that experts and election officials already know make voting easier and more accessible also help to climate-proof our elections.

“Can election officials in their conduct of elections, and can state legislators mitigate some of the effects of bad weather on a voter turnout? And the short answer is, of course. We have such things as mail-in and early voting,” said Robert M. Stein, an expert on voting and elections at Rice University. 

As Stein said, if people can anticipate bad weather – from a really rainy day to a catastrophic hurricane – then early voting, in particular, is a proven antidote. Which makes a lot of sense: the more time people have to vote, the better chance they have of making a plan, either going before the bad weather arrives, or having some leeway to do it in the weeks after they’re recovering.  

Mail-in voting is also a potential safety net, though Stein said in the research he and his colleagues have done, it tends to be less significant, since people often have to request their ballots far in advance. Displacements and evacuations may also make it harder for people to obtain those ballots at all. Still, in places that primarily vote by mail, and everyone gets a ballot —like Oregon – it might have a modest effect in mitigating some of the disruptions from disasters. Basically, as election experts said, the best practices to buffer voting from disasters are the same best practices that expand ballot access to all Americans. It’s good for democracy, with or without a once-in-a-generation hurricane. 

Yet, a storm as devastating as Helene makes all that infrastructure harder to sustain. Election officials must scramble to find new polling stations, or equip tents with generators. Wherever people are voting, those places need to be staffed with poll workers, and those poll workers who live in the same hurricane-devastated areas are often the most vulnerable – older, retired folks, in particular. Which means election officials need to be able to make adjustments in real-time to ensure affected areas have working polling stations and voters have the time and information to figure that all out.

“When your house is flooded and maybe your car isn’t working and you’re living somewhere else – voting is just going to fall down your list of priorities, for better or for worse,” said Kevin Morris, senior research fellow with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, who has studied the impact of hurricanes on elections. 

“So making sure that if voters decide shortly before the election – they get their life together and cast the ballot, but maybe that doesn’t get there until the day after the election –  making sure that vote can count is going to be really, really important.”

Flexibility – making sure affected voters have as many convenient and secure options to vote – is key. In a lot of ways, that’s what has happened in 2024 — North Carolina and other southeastern states walloped by storms did quickly adjust. In Georgia, early voting started on time with 159 counties, with just three counties each losing one polling place to damage. In Florida, which also had to deal with Hurricane Milton in the central part of the state, early voting opened on October 21, with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis also issuing executive orders to ease some voting rules in the most hard-hit areas, including extending early voting and giving voters more flexibility in where they can get their absentee ballots.

Not all efforts to change rules were successful – for example, federal judges blocked an effort to extend voter registration in Georgia and Florida. But for the most part, election experts said, these states have performed remarkably well. 

“Election officials continue to have everything thrown at them, a pandemic in 2020, massive amounts of disinformation, threats, harassment, hurricanes – and they’re still just delivering for the American people and making sure every voter had their voice heard,” said David Becker, Executive Director and Founder of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. 

To withstand everything thrown at them, election officials also need resources to back it up. Relocating a polling station in a hurricane-battered area can be difficult and expensive, but consolidating or closing stations may make it harder for people to vote. And election officials need the ability to communicate any changes to the public: if you’re altering the election rules to better serve voters, then they need to have that information, which can be really difficult. People have more pressing needs, local news is depleted, local election websites are not well-known for their web design, and all of this is happening in the disinformation cesspool that emerged after Hurricane Helene. 

That may still be the biggest challenge to these elections in the aftermath of Helene and Milton. North Carolina and Georgia are swing states, which the polls say are more or less tied. Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning counties were affected in all three states, which facilitated the bipartisan backing to tweak election rules and make it easier for voters to get to the polls and cast safe and secure ballots. Of course, if this sounds familiar, it should be – states took emergency measures to adapt voting for the Covid-19 pandemic, which President Donald Trump and his allies used to sow distrust in the election result. When he lost, this became part of his election denialism.

Right now, both Republicans and Democrats want their voters to be able to vote, so no one is challenging these changes at the moment, but already conspiracy theories are spreading about how Helene-related election changes are a supposed attempt to cheat, but what else would you expect from a hurricane apparently engineered and directed by the deep state to tip the election to Kamala Harris.

Of course, the more pro-voter options your state already has – from same-day registration to early in-person voting to no-excuse mail-in – the more resilient an election system is going to be, even amid catastrophic disruptions. But election officials will also need to adapt and adjust, which is also why who’s in these jobs matter. They’re on the front lines protecting elections against hurricanes, and everything else.