The North Carolina Board of Elections is allowing counties to make emergency changes after the hurricane

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) unanimously passed a resolution Monday making special provisions for voters in the 13 counties most affected by Hurricane Helene.

NCSBE Executive Director Karen Bell began Monday morning’s meeting with a status update.

“What a difference a week makes,” Bell said. “The last time we were together to discuss the emergency authority regarding absentee board meeting schedules in these affected counties, we looked at 14 offices that still could not be opened for work or to the public today “All county offices in North Carolina are open,” and that’s just a masterstroke.”

However, she said many voters and poll workers were still dealing with numerous issues following the storm. One of the board members, Stacy Eggers IV, said he visited five of the affected counties and saw the damage firsthand.

“These areas received over 20 inches of rain in less than 36 hours,” Eggers said. “As of today, we still have over 100,000 North Carolinians without power. Communications are significantly limited and our roads remain in a paralyzed state.”

The five-member board noted that in several western North Carolina counties — Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey — the “infrastructure for election administration and the “Voter access” to “polling stations and the postal service” was “significantly affected by the disaster.”

As a result, board members passed a resolution allowing election boards in those counties to make changes with a “bipartisan majority vote.”

They can change their early voting plans — such as adding or removing voting sites and changing the hours or days the sites are open — and changing their polling locations on Election Day.

On November 5th, these counties can set up polling places for a precinct outside of the actual precinct. If a county does not have the infrastructure to operate an Election Day website in a particular county, it can set up a website in another area or county for its voters to visit.

Additionally, boards of elections in these counties may use election officials and poll workers who are registered voters and residents of other North Carolina counties.

In addition, district offices can make arrangements for postal voters. You can process absentee ballot applications up until the day before Election Day. Without this change, the application deadline would have been October 29th.

Under the proposal, voters in these counties will now be able to drop off their mail-in ballots in person at any polling place on Election Day until 7:30 p.m. that day. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to submit it to the election office in their district.

Voters can also return their ballots to another North Carolina county board of elections by 7:30 p.m. Nov. 5 if they were moved to another county after the storm.

Typically, the state has “bipartisan support teams” that assist with absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots at nursing homes and assisted living facilities to accommodate voters with disabilities. According to the resolution, affected counties can also send these teams to disaster shelters and other locations where disaster relief is provided.

NCSBE members are then authorized to assist counties in processing voter registration applications and may assign election staff from other counties to assist with administrative tasks.

Additionally, the state Board of Elections will work with the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management to “coordinate the resources needed, which may include, but are not limited to, temporary facilities, generators, temporary restrooms and other necessities” to conduct elections.

During Monday’s meeting, Kevin Lewis, one of the board’s Republican members, expressed concern about continuing to promote “election integrity” while allowing voters to return their ballots to counties other than their home county.

“You don’t want to just get to the end of the election and people are blindsided by the number of ballots returned,” Lewis said.

Based on its recommendations, the board passed the resolution with an amendment that would require counties in the state to submit weekly reports on how many ballots they received and where they received out-of-county ballots.

The Board has the authority to adopt this resolution pursuant to a state law that allows it to exercise emergency powers in a scenario where the normal election schedule has been disrupted by a natural disaster.

Because of these changes, Bell said every county in the state will conduct in-person early voting and Election Day voting on Oct. 17 as planned. The voter registration deadline remains October 11th. She also said this is possible because of the support from counties across the state and other states.

“It was just a tremendous outpouring of support, not only from North Carolina’s 100 counties wanting to help their voting family, but also from people across the country reaching out to the vendors who work with those counties through their voting equipment, poll books and their printing services,” Bell said.

She added that while this decision is important, the board’s work is far from complete.

“We may identify additional measures as we continue to assess the situation as we learn more from the various utilities about what is and is not available for early voting or even Election Day,” Bell said. “And then of course we have to consider whether measures need to be taken to successfully complete the acquisition phase for these districts.”

Read the NCSBE resolution here.

Read more about how the hurricane is impacting the state’s elections here.