Hurricane HeleneNorth Carolina’s deadliest storm in modern times, devastating communities in the westernmost corner of the state, but not deterring resilient residents. early voting. In fact, the turnout has broken records the place of war country that can determine the outcome of 2024 presidential election.
“What most affected counties are seeing is an extraordinary number,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “We’ve seen a huge influx just from voters themselves, coming to the county board of elections, making sure they can still be poll workers, making sure they’re going to be able to. enter the sound.”
With damage estimated at more than $50 billion, Helene left some of the hardest-hit areas without electricity, clean water, critical roads and infrastructure for a month after landfall.
But election workers’ quick pivot to emergency measures and coordination with state administrators after Helene has resulted in a relatively smooth early voting process for residents in the 25 FEMA-designated disaster counties. Across the country, more than 2 million voted in the first week of early voting in the embattled state.
Questions remain in some circles about whether this heavily damaged swath of North Carolina will be ready for the 2024 election. Last week, GOP Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, suggested the Legislature should consider awarding the state’s electoral votes to former President Trump before the votes are counted.
“Look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties, you know what vote you probably had,” Rep. Harris said during a discussion at the Lincoln Reagan dinner in Maryland.
Harris’ comments prompted an immediate reaction from his North Carolina GOP colleague, Rep. Patrick McHenry. “It doesn’t make any sense to prejudge the outcome of the election, and it’s a false view of what’s going on in North Carolina,” McHenry said.
In a statement to CBS News, Harris offered clarification and said the “theoretical” exchange had been taken out of context. “As I have repeatedly said, every legal vote must be counted,” Harris said. “Right now, voting is going well in Western North Carolina.”
Steps taken by the Legislature and the State Board of Elections in recent weeks allow special accommodations to be made for the hardest-hit districts. These include new polling sites, extended voting hours and more absentee voting drop-off locations. Of the 80 sites originally planned for early voting in the affected counties, 76 are now operational, with plans to expand, according to election officials.
For Yancey County residents like Victor Mansfield, opting out is not an option. “No one is going to stop me from voting,” he said.
Mansfield lives along a one-lane mountain road in Burnsville, North Carolina, in one of the counties badly damaged by the storm. He was without electricity for four days before he made his way down to a shelter at a Red Cross facility. Mansfield said she was surprised by the turnout on the second day of early voting when she voted. “I was voter number 1,276,” he said. “I know a couple of other people that I go to church with that had their houses badly damaged … they made sure they were here so they could vote early.”
More than a third of Yancey County’s 14,600 registered voters have voted early and in person so far, according to county board officials, averaging about 700 voters per day since voting began on Oct. 17.
Joseph Trivette, deputy director of the Avery County Board of Elections said that despite the significant challenges, voter turnout in the county is very important.
“We’re averaging right around 500 days. I know it may not sound big for other places, but for Avery we have a total of 13,000 voters to give or take a few … an average of 500 days is huge,” said Trivette . “Avery County always comes out to vote, no matter who you vote for.”
Buncombe County, the largest in western North Carolina and home to 214,530 registered voters, initially saw modest early voting numbers. But in a few days, there was an exciting surge, with an average of more than 7,000 voters per day.
“I love the trend, people are coming out every day to do this,” said Jake Quinn, chairman of the Buncombe County Board of Elections. “If we can keep this going until next week, we’ll be really good.”
The Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party insist more can be done to address limited access to hurricane-affected voters in western, Republican-leaning counties. In a letter to the Buncombe Board of Elections and the State Board of Elections, he claimed “partisan voter suppression” in Buncombe County, and demanded expanded accommodations for voters in more remote areas.
Buncombe County election officials said 10 of the 14 planned early voting sites are operational, with 80 planned for Election Day, including one FEMA tent polling location, and 500 county poll workers.
“We just want to make sure that this election is smooth, as we can do in this extraordinary situation. And we are sure that we have taken care of the process and procedures correctly, according to the law, documenting everything that we do. , every decision that we make do it,” Quinn said. “We maintained our integrity through some very difficult situations.”
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