After Hurricane Helene’s Destruction, Voters in Key Swing States Are Showing Up in Force

It’s been a little over a month since Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, claiming hundreds of lives and causing an estimated $53 billion dollars in damages. In addition to being a record-breaking storm in its own right, Helene was also the first hurricane in American history to hit two battleground states within weeks of a major election.

In North Carolina, one of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential race this week, Helene’s destruction displaced thousands of people, caused hundreds of road closures, and disrupted mail just weeks before early voting in the state began. More than 20 post offices were still redirecting mail as of October 22.

North Carolina’s election board quickly took action to ensure people affected by the storm maintained their right to vote, approving a resolution to extend early voting deadlines and loosen some restrictions around absentee ballots, among other actions, in the 13 western counties impacted most severely by Helene. Despite these measures, a question still loomed: Would the storm dampen voter turnout?

As early voting wraps up, data being released by local officials in Helene’s path indicate that voter enthusiasm has not waned. Indeed, an inverse trend may be under way. North Carolina and Georgia, the other battleground states affected by Helene, have reported record-breaking early voting numbers: Voter turnout has surpassed 2012, 2016, and, in North Carolina, 2020 — a pandemic election year when many people were voting early to avoid crowds.

The North Carolina Board of Elections announced that there were 4 million ballots cast in the state as of 2 p.m. Friday, November 1, about 51 percent of North Carolina’s total registered voters and the state’s biggest year for early voting ever.

“It looks like even the western North Carolina counties that were most affected by Hurricane Helene do not have massively lower early voter turnout rates,” said Jowei Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan who studies redistricting and political geography. “It’s possible that the conveniences of mail-in voting and early voting have mitigated the potentially negative effects of the hurricane on voters.”

Chen noted that while displaced voters can request a mail-in ballot sent to their new, temporary residences, it’s inevitable that some of these hurricane victims will fall through the cracks as they deal with the logistics and mental burden of disaster recovery.

The high turnout in North Carolina and Georgia is a testament to the stakes of this election, widely viewed as among the most consequential of the 21st century, as well as the Republican party’s embrace of early voting this cycle. But election officials’ response to Hurricane Helene has also opened up new avenues for affected and displaced voters to participate. Disaster researchers say that the federal and state disaster relief process itself is likely influencing both how voters show up to vote and who they vote for.

In Avery County, North Carolina, the Roaring Creek, Ingalls, and Plumtree voting sites, which were damaged by the storm, were consolidated into Riverside Elementary School. In the middle of the day on Thursday, poll workers sat eating lunch as teachers went in and out of the school picking up supplies to deliver to struggling areas around the county. Though the day had been slow, workers said they’d seen between 600 and 700 people cast their ballots already that week — larger, they said, than previous years.

One county over, in hard-hit Spruce Pine, the largest town in heavily-Republican Mitchell County, about a dozen early voters pulled up to the volunteer fire department to cast their ballots over the course of an hour. The site, which is downtown and surrounded by wide, well-paved roads and parking lots, remains easily accessible. One voter, who gave her name as Lauren, said it was easier to vote early than to wait for Election Day, since she owned a campground affected by the flooding and had cleanup work to do.

Past research has shown that a hurricane can both suppress and galvanize voters. An otherwise politically engaged person who has had his or her home destroyed in a major disaster might deprioritize casting a ballot in favor of prioritizing something else more pressing, such as rebuilding their home.

On the other hand, voters who received disaster aid, federal or otherwise, following a storm might be more inclined to vote, and, some studies show, vote for the incumbent party (the party responsible for delivering that financial aid). Research also shows that people who did not receive sufficient help from the government are similarly inclined to vote, but for the challenging party.

James Robinson, a welder casting his ballot at the Spruce Pine polling center on Thursday, said he was a Trump voter before the hurricane and he would be one after. Robinson sustained home damage from Helene. He didn’t lose everything, like some did, but the experience reaffirmed his beliefs. “The government response here was pathetic,” Robinson said, citing what he said was a slow response, as he and his neighbors cut themselves out of their own driveways.

Thirty miles away, in Madison County, a majority-Republican area not far from Asheville, Francine, a 67-year-old small business owner who asked for her last name to be withheld, has been a registered voter for 10 years. Her house wasn’t badly damaged by Helene, but many of her neighbors’ homes and businesses, and her town’s infrastructure, were destroyed. “You go a few miles in any direction and it’s just terrible,” she said.

Days before the storm hit, Francine woke up in the middle of the night with a gastrointestinal obstruction and spent eight days in the hospital recovering. When she was discharged, she came home and noticed that she hadn’t received her voter registration card in the mail, but that her husband had. Over the course of the past year, North Carolina has removed nearly 750,000 registrants in an effort to flush duplicates, the deceased, and other ineligible voters from its voter rolls. Francine wondered if she had accidentally been counted among them. But she wasn’t well enough yet to drive to the election office to sort it out. The day she was due to get her sutures removed, Hurricane Helene hit. Francine’s husband removed the stitches himself as the storm raged around them.

Two weeks ago, Francine was finally able to drive to her local election office and prove to the officer that an error on her recently renewed driver’s license had led her registration to be improperly purged by the state. She cast her vote early last week for Kamala Harris, and was surprised by how many people she saw voting early as well.

Francine’s top issues are women’s rights, separation of church and state, and U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad. She wasn’t happy with either candidate, but she said she couldn’t stomach voting for Trump. The former president’s response to the hurricane, which poured gasoline on the fire of false rumors and conspiracy theories that cropped up after the storm, further soured her on his candidacy. “Everybody is pointing fingers at each other and it’s just getting really ugly,” she said. “Everybody is so worked up I think the turnout is going to be big.”

This story has been updated. This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.