We have all seen the scenes of utter devastation after Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina. Yet most county boards of elections were up and running within a few days, and every county in the affected area was conducting early voting (sometimes with modified plans) three weeks later.
To get an impression of how early voting was going, I visited two of the hardest-hit counties in western North Carolina: Yancey and Madison. I spoke with the board of elections directors and observed early voting in both counties. I also delivered some relief supplies and witnessed the ongoing recovery efforts there.
I wrote an op-ed on my observations for the Carolina Journal. Here is my bottom line:
From precinct officials, early voting workers, and county election officials to the General Assembly and the SBE, all are rising admirably to the challenge Hurricane Helene imposed on them.
Below is a more detailed (if stream-of-consciousness) account of that journey and my findings.
Destruction, Relief, and Resiliency
My first stop was not at an election site but at a relief aid distribution center. I brought an SUV load of supplies donated by friends and my colleagues at the John Locke Foundation to the former location of Fred’s discount store in Burnsville.
As I drove west on I-40 to Asheville and then north toward Burnsville, I saw increasingly intense scenes of destruction, including a valley in Yancey County that had been scoured so that only exposed rock, earth, and debris remained. However, most of the damage was more “mundane,” a landslide that closed one lane of the road here, a downed tree or power line there. That kind of damage is spread across much of the western part of the state, and the sheer volume of such damage means that it will take months or years for all of it to be repaired. Roads with one lane closed have not yet been repaired because crews are still focused on repairing roads with both lanes closed.
One underappreciated complicating factor is the geography of most valleys. They have a stream in the middle and the road off to one side. That means up to half of the people in those valleys must cross small bridges to get to the road. Helene destroyed many of those bridges or washed out the earth around them, further isolating the people living across the valley from the road.
The area is also a beehive of activity, with crews working on roads and riverbanks, linemen raising down power lines, and volunteers clearing houses and providing aid and support to those affected by Helene. While trying to get to a community in northern Yancey, I had to turn around because a line crew had taken over the road to get the neighboring lines up, and one worker informed me, “Yeah, we are going to be here a while.”
I also saw a generous outpouring of material aid. The aid distribution center where I dropped supplies off was manned by a large staff of national guardsmen and volunteers who provided food, showers, prayer, and supplies. People had given so much that it had overflowed from the distribution center out into the parking lot. There were other distribution points in Burnsville and other locations in the areas I visited. I also saw piles of supplies at random locations on a “need one, take one” basis.
While those supplies will be drawn down in the coming weeks, and there are ongoing and changing needs, the outpouring of support for the people affected by Helene is heartening.
Finally, in all the places I visited, local people were largely upbeat and working to repair, clean up, and serve their communities. (I admit that there is some selection bias involved since most of the places I visited were populated by relief or election workers and volunteers.)
Interviews with Two County Election Directors
I meet with Yancey County Board of Elections (BOE) Director Mary Beth Tipton soon after dropping off the relief supplies at Fred’s.
The Yancey BOE office is on high ground and was not directly affected by Helene. The building had power but not water, although workers could use the toilets as long as they had buckets of water to prime them. The BOE office serves as the county’s only early voting site and voters were periodically entering and leaving the building while I was there. While waiting in the front lobby for Tipton, I saw three young women getting their free voter IDs.
I met Madison County Board of Elections Director Jacob Ray about two hours later in their office in the county seat of Marshall. While downtown Marshall was overwhelmed by flooding from the French Broad River, the elections office and several other county government agencies are in a strip mall on high ground. Their office had power and water but lacked phone service, so they communicated with two cell phones provided by the county.
I interviewed both elections directors to get an impression of their response to Helene, how they felt about the support they were getting from the state, and their plans moving forward. Below are their responses to some of my questions. They have been cleaned some to improve readability (for example, removing “uhs” and repeated words), but are otherwise verbatim. I have combined replies to prepared and follow-up questions to save space and aid readability.
How is it going (in the office and in the rest of the county)?
Mary Beth Tipton (Yancey County): It’s going great. It is going great. Believe it or not. This location [is on a hill], so we were safe here. Everything was good. We had no structural damage, no damage to any voting equipment, and no ballots that had already been shipped. Everything’s good to go. So, great. Great.
[In the precincts,] that’s a different story. Had one precinct in Ramseytown completely washed away, we voted in their fire station, and they lost their fire station. All their fire trucks, they lost everything. We’re working on [an alternate voting site]. See, we’ve got a whole lot of issues down in there. The best way to describe it looks like a bomb went off. It took bridges out. We’ve got a community within that precinct right now, Big Creek, that you have to forge the river to access this or go all the way into Tennessee and come back around.
Jacob Ray (Madison County): Countywide, we did OK. Madison County is a big geographic county, but our towns, specifically Marshall and Hot Springs, were devastated. They took the brunt of it. There was some flooding up in the Spring Creek area and then the typical downed trees. Most people around the county did OK. Marshall is right off of French Broad [River], and then Hot Springs has Spring Creek, a pretty big body of water that runs right through the middle of town, and that got them.
What has been your biggest struggle in running the election here so far?
Tipton: I’ll be honest with you; I wouldn’t even say that we’ve had that hard of a struggle. We have amazing teams. This is an amazing county. Everybody’s pulled together.
The state has helped us so much. The Legislature helped us with the money. It’s just been absolutely amazing. I’ve requested six FEMA tents, temporary tents, to come up in polling locations. Not because six were destroyed. We had one destroyed and one damaged. But our schools, we always [vote] in the gyms, they are full. So the schools are being used [but] I’m still going be able to go onto school grounds.
Ray: So far, it’s been good. I mean, you probably saw that there was a record set in the state for votes cast on the first day of early voting. I would say that would probably happened here. We had 938 spread across the county. The first day is like that.
I think people are just excited to vote this year. It’s kind of back of mind, obviously, with everything going on, but with things starting to recover, it’s starting to become more front of mind. And people are dealing with government more so than they typically do, especially the federal government, so you [have to] think maybe that connects with them. Now, that’s just a theory on that.
The General Assembly and State Board of Elections may several changes to election law in the affected counties. Were those changes enough to ensure that the election goes smoothly in your county?
Tipton: Yeah, there was a lot of thought, evidently, that went into that bill because we got people that don’t have mailboxes. We had a post office completely washed away. So, being able to hand some of these people absentee ballots across the counter, a lot of them haven’t even left our office to be able to vote. They just were able to make it to town that day and wanted to go ahead and vote because they didn’t know if they would be able to get out the next day because these roads are being worked on. Let me tell you, it has been fabulous.
Ray: I was surprised at how much they did open it up. Really, I think we’ll vote more than we did, probably in 2020 at least. It’ll be a heavier turnout.
This is an extraordinary time. So, I think reverting back to the way that it was [regarding election law and regulations] prior would be the best practice.
[A final message from Ray to voters:] Elections are administered by a bipartisan board, usually bipartisan poll workers, and do not harass these poll workers. These people working in the polls are your friends, your neighbors. And they are following the the rules and guidelines that are prescribed by the state. So, don’t take your anger out, whatever your political issues are, on the poll workers.
Observing an Early Voting Site in Hot Springs
Ray introduced me to Dyatt (pronounced Dwight) Smathers, a member of the Madison County Board of Elections, who was to take me to Hot Springs. I asked him, “Are you my escort or my minder?”
He laughed and said, “I guess a little of both.” He then took me to Hot Springs in his pickup truck.
Elevated railroad trackers spared central Hot Springs from most of the flooding from the French Broad River. Unfortunately, Spring Creek flows through the middle of town, and it inundated it with several feet of water. People were cleaning and rebuilding when we arrived, but none of those buildings in the middle of town was usable.
Among those buildings was the Bill Whitten Community Center, western Madison County’s designated early voting site. As with the other buildings in downtown Hot Springs, access to it has been restricted, rendering it useless as a voting site.
That forced the county board of elections to move the early voting site to the Hot Springs Senior Center, located uphill on the edge of town.
When we arrived there, Smathers pointed out a generator provided by the State Board of Elections. They had not had to use it because power had been restored to the building before early had started, but they were keeping it around in case of a disruption.
Inside, we meet Dean Benfield and her crew of election workers. Benfield told me that business had been pretty good that day (according to Vote Tracker, 69 people voted on that site on the day of my visit, which is not bad for an early voting site in a relatively sparsely populated area). She liked that the new site had more parking but pointed out that the interior was a little smaller than at the previous site, and they had to shove furniture off to the side to make more room.
That crew has been working elections together for years. They had an easy camaraderie and were willing to crack jokes at their own and each other’s expense. I was allowed to take some pictures once a voter had turned in her ballot. She was still in the enclosure when took the pictures but by then had transformed from a voter to someone visiting with neighbors and relatives who were working at the site.
Benfield noted one concern that we often hear from election officials: not enough younger election workers. She is 81 years old and said that this would probably be the last election she worked. She was not even the oldest person working there.
But the main point remains. Even in one of the most isolated areas in one of the places hardest-hit by Helene, election officials were able to keep the voting site open.
Lessons Learned
During my visit to Yancey and Madison counties, I got a first-hand account of what those communities went through, their resiliency in the face of disaster, and the generosity of the people who have responded to their needs.
I also got a first-hand account of how local election officials are responding to the crisis and how support from the General Assembly and the State Board of Elections have helped them with that response. While some voters in western North Carolina may still have difficulty casting their ballot, the 13 counties most severely impacted by Helene have so far had higher voter turnout than the rest of North Carolina.
That is a testimony to both the resiliency of the people of western North Carolina and the dedication of the election officials and workers to making sure they can exercise their right to vote.
