Cliff Marr, the elections director in North Carolina’s Polk County, crosses the Big Hungry River to pick up votes from residents whose road access was washed away by tropical storm Helene, on Nov. 1.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
The morning sun has yet to emerge from the trees as Cliff Marr navigates the concrete slabs laid down as a temporary crossing over the Big Hungry River. Upstream, a waterfall pours through the concrete remnants of a dam ripped apart by the torrential rainfall of Tropical Storm Helene in late September. The floodwaters also knocked out a critical bridge on the road. In the first days after the storm, local residents carried food and fuel across the water on electrical cables strung as a makeshift zip-line.
Now, workers have begun the job of rebuilding the bridge. But construction is likely to take months.
In the meantime, there is an election to conduct.
Mr. Marr, the elections director in North Carolina’s Polk County, clambers up metal scaffolding that is now the only way up the river’s eastern bank. On the other side, local resident Mike Marsteller stops his car near the ragged edge where the pavement ends. He opens his window and hands Mr. Marr a dozen envelopes.
Inside are ballots for the U.S. election on Nov. 5, including one marked by Mr. Marsteller himself. Roughly 80 people live on the road serviced by the bridge. They began to think about how they would vote soon after they had gathered enough basic necessities to put hunger worries to rest, said Mr. Marsteller, a retired deputy sheriff.
“Nothing’s normal at this point. We had to deal with what we were dealt,” he said. But “these things matter, and they want their voice to be heard.”
Not long after the rains subsided, Mr. Marsteller reached out to the local elections office, proposing an election day tent at the riverside. Mr. Marr offered instead to be an official delivery service, shuttling absentee ballot requests across the river, then the ballots themselves.
“You do what you have to do to help your voters vote,” Mr. Marr said.
Helene struck North Carolina 5½ weeks before election day, leaving destruction so complete that those overseeing state elections contemplated extraordinary measures. Four Eggers, a member of the State Board of Elections, wondered whether they would have to deliver ballots by helicopter or ATV – or even horseback. Such measures have not, in the end, proved necessary. Work crews from across the continent have reopened enough roads that ballots did not need to be airlifted.
But North Carolina has nonetheless made a remarkable effort to conduct an election in the aftermath of a natural disaster. In western parts of the state, some homes remain without power. Many do not yet have potable water. Basements are caked in mud. The shells of commercial buildings still dangle over eroded riverbanks.
Across the state, however, only five early voting locations were not opened, some because they were wiped out by the storm. On election day, three voting sites will be situated in federal emergency tents equipped with generators and portable toilets. The state has made allowances for people to vote outside their home counties, and to sign affidavits rather than provide identification that may have been lost in the tempest.
“It’s really come together very well,” Mr. Eggers said.
For some, conducting the election has come at a personal cost. Floodwaters coursed through Robert Inman’s home and barns in the Great Smoky Mountains. Mr. Inman, the Haywood County elections director, is not certain the bridge to his home is structurally sound. But he has not had time to make repairs. He left in the midst of the storm and has only returned briefly twice, devoting his time instead to the myriad tasks of the election.
“This is important. And it’s a responsibility,” he said. Still, he allowed “it’s been quite an ordeal.”
The North Carolina election had already been thrown into turmoil in advance of Helene. The withdrawal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from state presidential ballots forced a last-minute reprinting.
In Buncombe County, which encompasses the Asheville area, where officials have counted 43 storm-related deaths, absentee ballots were mailed out Sept. 24.
Three days later, the pounding rains began to fall.
It quickly became apparent that some of the early voting sites would need to be relocated. The original plan relied on fire stations that have now become emergency response headquarters. A list of 14 locations was pared down to 10. Voting hours were trimmed in hopes of keeping elderly volunteer poll workers from driving home at night on roads missing guardrails and pocked with poorly marked sinkholes, said Jake Quinn, who chairs the county elections board.
He was also worried about adding to the burdens of people already struggling to manage domestic disaster. “When you get burnout, mistakes can be made,” he said. “That is the threat to election integrity.”
Some of those changes have proven controversial. The Republican National Committee sent the Buncombe board a letter demanding expanded voting hours and saying more early voting sites must be opened in more rural areas. The cutbacks amount to voter suppression, Margaret Ackiss, a North Carolina Republican, wrote on X.
The elections board took pains to select locations that did not discriminate against groups of voters, said Steven Aceto, a retired lawyer who is a Republican board member.
But anger remains. “We don’t know where that will go. Maybe someone will file a lawsuit,” he said.
There is some numerical evidence that their efforts have succeeded. In Buncombe County, early voting tallies have exceeded those from the past election; across the state, advance voting numbers have touched a new record high.
Mr. Aceto sees the eagerness to vote as a collective act of defiance.
“What was being expressed here was the desire to return to normalcy, and to get control over one’s life,” he said.
“Voting is an iconic means of recovering a sense of purpose.”
On a recent weekday afternoon, a small line formed outside Buncombe’s Black Mountain Library. Among those voting was Sam Bedinger, a former research scientist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. He expects higher turnout than in previous years, propelled by national fervour. “There’s a lot of interest in this election. It’s got a lot of people motivated and concerned,” he said.
A short drive away, in a neighbourhood still drying out from floodwaters, Navy veteran Dan Creasman had already cast his ballot. “Hell or high water, I was going to vote,” he said. “And we sure had the high water.”