Four days after historic floods battered western North Carolina, the difficulties facing county officials who are trying to stage a presidential election in the area have begun to take shape.
A preliminary check of election offices in North Carolina’s flooded west showed that offices in 14 counties were closed, with officials unsure when they would open, the State Board of Elections said late Monday. One office in Haywood County, just west of hard-hit Asheville, could not be reached.
While the region is largely rural, it holds a healthy share of the state’s nearly 7.7 million registered voters. Some 570,000 registered voters live in the 11 counties where less than half of the electrical power had been restored as of Monday afternoon. They include 145,000 Democrats and 185,000 Republicans.
One of the hardest hit counties, Buncombe, is home to Asheville, the region’s Democratic stronghold. In most counties, however, Republicans or unaffiliated voters are dominant.
Election officials face a panoply of problems. The remnants of Hurricane Helene struck the region shortly after absentee ballots were put in the mail, and the U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail service to virtually all of western North Carolina.
Those ballots would have been dispatched earlier, but they had to be reprinted after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quit the presidential race and sued to have his name removed from ballots.
County officials also are likely to encounter trouble finding accessible sites for early voting, which begins Oct. 17. Finding voters who were displaced will be yet another headache. So will be registering voters, as the deadline for registering is Oct. 11.
Michael C. Bitzer, an elections expert at Catawba College, said that “counties have been preparing for early voting sites that may no longer exist.”
“They had reserved polling places that may have been swept away in the floodwaters,” he said. “They have voters who requested an absentee ballot and cannot receive that ballot, let alone the poll workers and the major disruption to their lives.”
In 2018, after Hurricane Florence ravaged 28 counties along the North Carolina coast, the state extended the voter registration deadline and spent $400,000 for a campaign to locate displaced voters and educate other residents about voting options.
Officials don’t have such plans yet, said Gerry Cohen, a veteran analyst of state government and a member of the election board in Wake County, which includes the state capital, Raleigh.
“There are a lot of unknowns on what to do,” he said. “We’re a couple of days away from finding out what’s going on.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
