Helene adds stress to election in North Carolina

• "Voting won't be a priority for a lot of people," said Seth Morris, an election law expert and associate at Parker Poe in North Carolina.
• Communities in western North Carolina were decimated by the storm, which has killed more than 100 people across the Southeast.

Driving the news: North Carolina election officials already were under heightened pressure this year after the state Supreme Court granted an 11th-hour change allowing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to remove his name from state ballots because he'd suspended his campaign.

• Mail-in and absentee ballots initially were set to be sent out on Sept. 6, but the court's ruling forced election officials to scramble to reprint ballots.
• That was a costly change that resulted in the state not being able to begin sending out mail-in and absentee ballots out until Sept. 24.

Now, with mail and delivery services suspended in many ZIP codes across western North Carolina, officials are racing to answer questions about how and when the voters who requested ballots will receive them.

• Nearly 250,000 North Carolinians have requested an absentee ballot this year, including almost 10,000 from Buncombe County, which includes Asheville and is one of the hardest-hit parts of the state, according to state data.
• "I suspect if these things were in people's mailboxes Thursday and Friday, a lot of these counties, you can see stuff just completely washed away," Gerry Cohen, a member of the Board of Elections in Wake County, told the News and Observer.
• Buncombe and Wake counties are mostly Democratic, but the damage also was severe in Republican-leaning areas, such as in Yancey County.

Between the lines: The devastation from the storm comes as poll workers and election officials in North Carolina were working under tenuous circumstances as the threats to election administrators continue to rise.

• Election officials have been bracing for the possibility of former President Trump and his allies seizing on any expected delays or changes in the election process to falsely claim that the election was fraudulent, as Trump did when he lost to President Biden in 2020.
• North Carolina — and Georgia, another state hit by Helene — are among the politically divided swing states likely to decide an election that polls suggest will be decided by razor-thin margins.

Zoom out: Early in-person voting begins in North Carolina on Oct. 17, a deadline that may be difficult for officials in some parts of the state to meet, especially if any of their polling locations were damaged or destroyed.

• "There are small staffs in a lot of these places whose attention is obviously going to be elsewhere," Morris said.
• "[Many] won't be able to go to work this week and prepare for early voting and to handle the mail-ballots that are coming in."

What they're saying: Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of North Carolina's State Board of Elections, said during an emergency meeting on Monday that all members of the North Carolina elections community are safe and "preparing themselves to serve all eligible voters."

• She said the field specialist in Buncombe County walked "to the county office today from his home, which ... is probably about a four- or five-mile trek."
• Brinson Bell said that 14 of 22 of the state's counties were closed on Monday and she said she expects "several more days of closure." She said that she had not received a status report from one county.

The bottom line: "We do not stop an election, we figure out how to proceed," she said.

Go deeper: "Our hearts are heavy": NWS writes emotional letter to Carolinas, Georgia