How Hurricane Helene scrambled the election in North Carolina

The Today, Explained podcast is taking a deep dive into the major themes of the 2024 election through the lens of seven battleground states. We’ve heard from voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin so far; this week we turn to North Carolina, where a storm last month devastated the state — and some of its election infrastructure.

Officials in North Carolina are preparing for an election like no other in the wake of Hurricane Helene. The storm scrambled North Carolinians’ voting infrastructure — washing away absentee ballots, disrupting mail service, and destroying polling locations — and could impact what Election Day looks like in two weeks.

The state is expected to be close — former President Donald Trump won by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, and current polling averages suggest an even tighter race this year — and all eyes are on the mountains, which received the brunt of the hurricane’s impact last month. 

While some parts of life are getting back to normal after Hurricane Helene swept through last month — power returning, internet service restored — many people in the west of the state are still without potable water in their homes. 

With so many people displaced or managing repairs, experts have raised concerns about depressed voter turnout.

“The question is going to be: If you’re having to avoid swallowing water while you shower, how important is voting going to be to you?” Steve Harrison, a political reporter at NPR affiliate station WFAE, told Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram. 

In an effort to ensure the election proceeds as close to normally as possible, local election officials have been allowed to move polling locations and adjust hours. The state has also updated rules for absentee voters, allowing them to return their completed ballots to counties other than their home county, as previously required — though the state stopped short of re-instituting a three-day grace period for ballots to be returned for counting. 

Even with the added flexibility, actually communicating the changes to voters in the affected areas remains challenging. “Information is hard to get, because the internet is down and cell service is down, and everything changes on a day-to-day basis,” Buncombe County resident Kaitlyn Leaf said. “Sometimes hour by hour.” (Leaf is married to a Vox Media employee, audio engineer Patrick Boyd.)

So far, officials’ efforts to create more flexibility for voters seem to be paying off: The state set a turnout record on the first day of early voting, which began in all 100 counties on October 17, though it’s unclear how many of those votes were cast in the affected areas. 

These voters could have an outsized impact on the outcome of the national election, according to Harrison’s analysis. Of the 15 counties that were most impacted by Helene, Biden won only two in 2020: Buncombe, home to the liberal city of Asheville, and Watauga, where Appalachian State University is located. The rest, Trump won by wide margins. 

Polling averages show the 2024 presidential race in North Carolina as a dead heat, which means any decrease in turnout in those counties could ultimately hurt the former president’s chances.  

“If it’s incredibly close, I don’t think we’re going to hear the last of Helene,” Harrison told Today, Explained. 

Election Day worries in other battleground states, briefly explained 

North Carolina isn’t the only state that could run into Election Day obstacles, though Hurricane Helene’s impact makes its situation unique. Extraordinarily thin margins and wrinkles in the vote-counting rules in other battleground states could delay the full results of the election past November 5.

With polls showing several of the battleground states neck-and-neck between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, election officials are warning that they may need to count a greater share of ballots before media organizations are able to reliably make their projections, resulting in a multi-day process similar to 2020.

Many states are also dealing with last-minute attempts to purge voter rolls and change election rules. But at least two states are likely to see delays because their election rules stayed the same. 

In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, election officials are barred from processing mail ballots until 7 am on Election Day. In other states with mail-in ballots, workers may prepare ballots for counting earlier — verifying signatures, flattening the ballots — in order to streamline vote counting on Election Day. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania election workers’ later starts may result in delayed calls this year, particularly if the race comes down just a few thousand votes. 

Both state legislatures considered updating their rules after the 2020 election, but conspiracy theories and partisan gridlock ultimately killed bills that would have done so. 

“It’s a real frustration,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told CNN in September. “[The proposed legislation] does not benefit any candidate. It does not benefit any party. It only benefits the public in knowing results earlier and our election officials, who otherwise don’t have to work day and night.”

As we saw in 2020, any delay between Election Day and the final results leaves ample room for conspiracy theories to take hold — something Trump is likely to take full advantage of. In 2020, Trump posted about “surprise ballot dumps” in Milwaukee after a jump in Biden votes when the city reported all of its absentee ballots at the same time. (He still falsely claims that he won Wisconsin in 2020.)

CNN political correspondent Sara Murray says voters ought to ignore the conspiracy theories in the event of a longer wait for results in 2024.“Just because this takes a couple of days doesn’t mean that there is some kind of mass-scale voter fraud going on,” she told Today, Explained. “It doesn’t mean machines are flipping votes. It doesn’t mean people are throwing away ballots. It just means election workers are still counting the votes.”