While recovery efforts continue in western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, state and local election officials are scrambling to find ways to conduct an election — which is fewer than 40 days away — amid the damage, power outages, and lack of internet access in the crucial swing state.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), a Democrat-run institution that has a history of undermining election integrity, met in the past week to lay out initial responses to how the 25 counties and eastern Cherokee tribal areas under disaster declaration can cast ballots.
Overall, 1,275,054 total registered voters in the 25 primarily red counties are affected by the disaster as of Oct. 1, with the largest number of affected affiliated voters (more than 480,000) being Republican. Another nearly one million voters are unaffiliated, and the area has just under 300,000 registered Democrats, according to the NCSBE.
While certain contingencies and deviations from the norm will likely be required to ensure the deep-red portion of the state can vote, some election integrity leaders in the state are concerned the NCSBE could take advantage of the disaster to circumvent protections for the election.
“[W]e know they can be counted on [to] use the emergency as an excuse to subvert any election integrity safeguards written into the law,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told The Federalist.
According to the NCSBE, election officials are not currently aware of “any situations where voting equipment
