In the past month, hurricanes have wreaked havoc across the American Southeast. Hurricane Helene killed more than 200 people in six states, with about half of the deaths occurring in North Carolina. In Florida, at least 24 people died because of Hurricane Milton. Officials issued evacuation orders to upwards of five and a half million people for Hurricane Milton, and both storms deprived several million people of electricity. Estimates of the damage vary, but experts think that economic losses from each hurricane will likely exceed $50 billion.
Climate change will continue to make weather disasters more common and more severe. Global warming will increase the intensity of tropical cyclones, worsen extreme flooding, and make wildfires more frequent. Extreme storms can now penetrate further inland, threatening areas once perceived as low risk. As refugees from climate disasters focus on essentials like food, water, and shelter, it is the responsibility of government to protect Americans’ safety, aid in rebuilding, and ensure that citizens are not disenfranchised.
Extreme weather events pose practical challenges to elections. Numerous studies have found that even non-disastrous levels of rain decrease voter turnout, but extreme weather events threaten to undermine the very logistics of election administration.
Hurricane Helene created a host of election administration problems that election officials are working to resolve in North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. For example, in North Carolina, some polling locations “don’t even exist anymore.” Some citizens cannot return to their homes, so officials must also consider how—and where—to distribute absentee ballots. Roads are damaged and blocked, making it difficult for the Postal Service to deliver ballots. Election offices themselves may have lost power, which makes it more difficult for election officials to coordinate solutions to these problems. Fortunately, basic election equipment escaped the brunt of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, but there’s no guarantee that ballots and voting machines will survive future storms.
In the face of storm-driven election issues, some mitigation strategies are better than others.
North Carolina and Florida are currently allowing some impacted counties to change or combine polling locations. These measures may be unavoidable if physical structures are damaged, but there are costs to this approach. Most evidence suggests that increasing the distance that voters must travel to get to the polls reduces turnout, as does changing polling locations. Accordingly, social scientists found that Florida’s consolidation of polling places after 2018’s Hurricane Michael decreased voter turnout.
Rather than reduce voter access after storms, states and localities can work to offset the difficulty of voting post-disaster by increasing the pathways that voters have to the polls. That can mean providing resources for setting up emergency polling places and making absentee or early voting more flexible. North Carolina’s state election board is allowing voters in some counties to receive absentee ballots in person and return their ballots to other counties. The state also allowed county boards to modify early voting locations and times. Florida loosened signature requirements for sending mail-in ballots to new addresses and allowed early voting to continue until Election Day. In particular, promoting early voting may be most effective if there is insufficient time post-disaster to fully promote and implement voting by mail, as occurred during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and Hurricane Michael.
Particularly as climate disasters become more frequent and more severe, these emergency solutions must be accompanied by a long-term strategy to protect Americans’ political rights in the difficult years and decades to come. As climate journalist Abrahm Lustgarten has written, climate change will result in large-scale population displacement. Fortifying our election system is only one piece of this larger political challenge.
Commentary
Protecting the right to vote in a time of climate crisis
October 21, 2024