Oh, Right, The Hurricane May Leave North Carolina Elections F*cked, Too
Like, more than the Legislature has.
With less than five weeks to go before the general election, elections officials in several storm-damaged parts of North Carolina are racing to make it possible for people to vote despite the widespread chaos caused by the storm. North Carolina is an especially swingy swing state this year, with the potential to give Kamala Harris a big boost toward victory if enough voters are disgusted by the Republican nominee for governor, porn and fascism fancier Mark Robinson.
Early voting in North Carolina is set to begin October 17 — as in two weeks from today — but in some parts of the state, it’s not clear where polling places will be, according to Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
“There may be polling places impacted by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, and there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Bell said. She said the board will have a clearer idea by Friday which polling places will need replacement; if need be, temporary voting sites can be set up in tents in parking lots, like the state did in 2019 after Hurricane Dorian.
And on top of the physical disruptions to the voting system, there’s also the rampant misinformation being spread by one of the presidential candidates to make things fun, too. We’re sure the lies will spread soon enough to misinformation about the voting adjustments; that just seems inevitable.
NPR reports that as of Tuesday, a dozen elections offices around the state were closed, preventing officials from processing new voter registrations or sending or receiving absentee ballots. Mail ballots already went out before the storm and North Carolina isn’t normally a big vote-by-mail state in any case, with mail ballots making up only about five percent of the 2022 vote. It isn’t known how many of those ballots may have been destroyed in the flooding.
Now there’s this massive displacement of the population, with many roads in rural areas still inaccessible, or gone altogether. And as the Washington Post points out (gift link),
State law in North Carolina allows anyone to ask for an absentee ballot to be mailed to a temporary home. But with the U.S. Postal Service suspending service across a wide swath of western North Carolina because of Helene’s impact, it was unclear whether those ballots would arrive — and whether they could be mailed back.
Ashe County elections official Devon Houck told the Post that at least one post office in her county was flooded, and that hundreds of home mailboxes were washed in the flooding.
“We will still hold an election and will make sure everyone gets an opportunity to vote,” Houck said. “It will just be different and harder.”
On the up side, those who requested absentee ballots can still vote in person, and that part of the election system should be up and running semi-normally by Election Day. Voters can also request a replacement ballot if theirs is lost, and North Carolina “runs a robust ballot-tracking system that allows voters to see when their completed ballot has arrived back at their county election headquarters.”
The Post also notes that the last few years of Trump-inspired paranoia about voting may mean the state board of elections won’t be able to help rural counties adapt to the disaster, because last year the (gerrymandered) GOP-controlled Lege
made it more difficult for the board’s staff to take emergency actions such as allowing counties to swap out one polling location for another. The legislature also changed state law to require absentee ballots to arrive in their county no later than Election Day, eliminating the grace period that allowed any ballot postmarked by that day to arrive up to three days later.
It’s sad, because making it easier for voters to vote during the pandemic was obviously just an invitation to massive voter fraud that nobody could actually show. The restrictions may mean trouble for the mostly Democratic city of Asheville and the rest of Buncombe County, where some of the worst damage hit. But the rest of the 25 western counties covered by the federal disaster declaration mostly went for Trump in 2022, and who could have possibly imagined that making it more difficult to adapt voting procedures could potentially harm voters the Lege likes?
Bell, the elections board director, said the board may ask the Lege to restore the grace period for absentee votes for this election, and will definitely seek funding for local elections offices to deal with the disruptions. Voting rights groups may go to court to ask for the ballot deadline to be extended, said Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina:
“Most of western North Carolina does not have operational postal service. The sending and delivering of those absentee ballots has now been put on pause indefinitely,” he said.
North Carolina law also includes an exception to the usual voter ID requirement: If a natural disaster destroys a voter’s identification documents, they can still vote.
We can’t see Republicans freaking out over that, not at all.
The biggest challenge, next to getting emergency voting changes into place while complying with the new restrictions, will be getting information to voters who are already going to be extremely busy just getting their lives back to something like normal.
Whatever the state and counties come up with, we’re certain that everyone on both sides will appreciate that the disaster is an opportunity to put aside partisan differences so that a fair election can still be conducted under difficult circumstances. We’re also certain that pigs can fly.
Mark Robinson Said WHAT On The Porn Forums About Loving Transgender Porn And Being A 'Black Nazi'?
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I'm just really upset about this new normal, and I'm devastated about all the loss of life.
Republicans only offer you dead bodies and hatred. Man. A lot of them must be ECSTATIC about all this chaos and inability to vote; this could be their key to keeping North Carolina under their unreconstructed control.
I am glad there's a competent federal administration spearheading the effort and they have a Democratic governor who will help too.
Florida woman here. For what it's worth, whenever we get hit, it's the large urban areas that recover the fastest. It radiates out from there. So I'm thinking Ashville will bounce back first, and then the less populated and more spread out rural towns.