Early Voting and Disaster Mitigation

Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeast, making a Florida landfall in the late evening of Thursday, September 27 and then quickly cut a path of destruction across Georgia, South Carolina before dumping its moisture on the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. I count myself lucky that my inconvenience was that my house lost power only for a day.

Helene arrived just as North Carolina’s delayed mail ballots were arriving in voters’ mail boxes. This allows us to observe how the storm affected mail ballot activity in Western North Carolina.