North Carolina changes voting rules for those affected by Hurricane Helene

Storm damage from Helene caused state lawmakers to authorize a number of changes to election rules that will apply only to the 25 counties in western North Carolina under emergency orders. The changes mostly deal with voting by mail and with polling place workers and observers.

2024-10-14

Drop mail-in ballots off early at any polling place

While voters in all of North Carolina will be allowed to hand-deliver their mail-in ballots to early voting sites in their home county, voters from the western counties will also be allowed to hand-deliver their mail ballots to any early voting site in any county, during the entire early voting period.

On Election Day itself, voters anywhere in the state may also hand-deliver their mail-in ballots to their home county’s board of elections office. They may not deliver them to individual polling places on Election Day.

Vote by mail. Application deadline extended for WNC

As for requesting mail-in ballots, people in the western counties will also have until 5 p.m. on Nov. 4, the day before the election, to do so—instead of the Oct. 29 deadline for voters in the rest of the state. Furthermore, the new disaster relief bill allows voters in those western counties to request a mail-in ballot at their county elections office and immediately receive it in person, rather than having to wait for it to be mailed to them.

The new law also gives local elections officials in the western counties additional flexibility to move poll workers from precinct to precinct on Election Day. Relatedly, local elections officials in those 25 counties will also now have flexibility to transfer voters to new precinct locations. At least some polling places were destroyed or damaged in the storm, and others may still be inaccessible or without power by Election Day. They’re also empowered to create new polling places, but “only as a last resort.”

For further updates, voters should watch for updates from their county government, or contact the local elections office. Information about a voter’s assigned precinct can be found using the state’s online voter lookup tool.