NORTH CAROLINA, USA — North Carolina's State Board of Elections unanimously approved an emergency voting resolution Monday, codifying support for the state's Hurricane Helene victims as they try to vote in the upcoming 2024 elections.
“It's somewhat taking the voting to the voters," said Karen Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. "They may be isolated, and have difficulties getting out of their homes and communities to get to the county seats."
Many of the changes apply to physical operations for 13 western North Carolina counties who suffered substantial damage from Helene.
The resolution primarily allows local elections board to make changes to their early voting and election day logistics, to operate around the parameters of Helene's damage.
This includes:
- Changing or adding sites, or removing sites that are unusable. Before removing a site, the county board shall make all feasible attempts to maintain the site’s availability.
- Adding or reducing days that any site is open within the established early voting period.
- Extending or reducing hours that any site is open on any days within the
- established early voting period.
Elections boards may also modify election day polling sites, and recruit additional emergency poll worker staffing.
Applicable to all counties across North Carolina is a new provision that allows the impacted voters from those respective counties the ability to hand deliver absentee ballots to other local elections offices if they are physically unable to get back to the locality they're registered in.
For voters staying with family and friends in other parts of the state while recovering, it allows them to ensure their ballot and vote are accounted for even if they can't access their home.
"I don’t foresee it being a huge problem, it's something we’re happy to do," said Kimberly Twine, Board of Elections Director for Currituck County. "Counties have been asking and looking for ways to help our fellow boards, this is just one more thing."
Twine also added that their office has received requests from students who may be displaced from their university, and are now back home indefinitely and are unsure where to vote.
Twine suggested the best course of action in situations like that are to request an absentee ballot, which is possible until the October 29 deadline.