Politics
Why aren’t hurricane-impacted states trying to extend voter registration?
UPDATE (Oct. 10, 2024, 2:15 p.m. ET): Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on Wednesday evening, leaving a trail of destruction that killed at least 11 people and left millions without power.
With Hurricane Milton expected to make landfall in Florida Wednesday night, many people in the Sunshine State are bracing for potentially historic devastation. Meanwhile, federal officials are questioning the Federal Emergency Management Agency‘s capacity to handle another catastrophic storm so soon after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across North Carolina and five other states.
Given Helene’s human toll and Milton’s expected disaster, you might ask, “Who could possibly think about an election at a time like this?” And yet, for election administrators in these states, there is little choice. A presidential election waits for no one.
And so, from Tallahassee to Charlotte, state officials already have consulted applicable statutes and regulations and modified typical procedures to ensure that their residents can freely and fairly exercise their rights to vote.
To date, none of the impacted states’ officials with authority over elections has voluntarily extended registration deadlines.
In particular, North Carolina’s five-member board of elections voted unanimously on Monday to give voters in 13 counties multiple accommodations, including more time to request and receive ballots by mail. The board also gave county boards latitude — so long as a bipartisan majority is in favor — to change their schedules and hours for early voting, which begins on Oct. 17, among other things. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis implemented similar adjustments for 13 counties in his state through an executive order he signed last week.
On one hand, they should be applauded for their quick thinking and flexibility in the face of disaster. But they should also be asked whether the measures they’ve taken went far enough, especially with respect to eligible voters who had yet to register before Helene hit. To date, none of the impacted states’ officials with authority over elections has voluntarily extended registration deadlines, even as roads remain buckled, phone lines have not been restored, and designated polling sites are damaged, inaccessible and unusable.
In North Carolina, that’s perhaps understandable. After all, prospective voters can register and then vote on the same day if they go to an early voting site between Oct. 17 and Nov. 2.
But the failure to protect potential, eligible voters in other places makes little sense.
For instance, in South Carolinaas of Oct. 4, “[s]everal county voter registration offices were closed for days before being able to reopen for registration,” while offices in three counties remained closed, according to the South Carolina Election Commission. Yet neither the attorney general nor the governor took action to extend the voter registration deadline.
Therefore, the South Carolina Democratic Party suedasking a court to order the state’s election commission to extend the registration deadline. And on Oct. 4 — the deadline for in-person registration and just days before the deadlines for electronic and mail-in registration — Judge Daniel Coble gave all South Carolinians until Oct. 14 to register, whether in person or by mail, email, fax or internet.
Coble, who was initially appointed by GOP Gov. Henry McMaster and allowed the state to enforce its six-week abortion ban earlier this year, might not seem the likeliest judge to take what seems like a liberal approach to voting access. But faced with the choice of unfairly denying the franchise to hurricane victims versus giving other potential voters extra, unearned days to register, he erred on the side of facilitating all citizens’ ability to vote.
Voting rights advocates in other Helene-impacted states have taken notice. On the day of Georgia’s voter registration deadline, Oct. 7, the NAACP‘s Georgia chapter and two other groups filed a lawsuit in Atlanta federal court seeking an immediate extension to Oct. 14 as well. Noting that there is historically a spike in voter registration right before the deadline, these plaintiffs argued that there are likely “thousands of voters who could not register while power was down, roads were impassible and county election and post offices were closed.”
Declarations from local leaders underscore how some registration efforts had to be abandoned in the wake of Helene. For example, one Georgia non-profit focused on voter registration, education and turnout efforts in historically marginalized communities not only canceled all door-to-door canvassing efforts in two Georgia counties between Oct. 4 and 7, but also could not pick up and drop off voter registration materials to the board of elections in one of those counties because its office has been closed since Sept. 27.
Indeed, on Oct. 8, just one day after the Georgia deadline, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, issued an executive order extending a state of emergency for nearly 70 Georgia counties through Oct. 16. Yet judging by his statementsGeorgia’s secretary of state seems to think Helene will not cause anything more than minimal disruption to this election if that. His website similarly suggests the most important election-related accommodations necessary for Georgians impacted by Helene are allowing them to receive their absentee ballots at a new, temporary address or helping them obtain a new state ID if theirs was lost due to Helene.
In the meantime, a hearing was held in the Georgia case on the afternoon of Oct. 9. There, Judge Eleanor Ross denied the plaintiffs’ request for one form of emergency relief that would extend the deadline, but scheduled a second hearing for Oct. 10 where, according to NAACP Conference of Georgia President Gerald Griggs, she asked for testimony from prospective voters who were not able to register because of the hurricane. After the hearing, Griggs remarked, “So we lost the battle but might be able to win the war.”
And then there is Florida, where, on Monday, Florida’s registration deadline, DeSantis issued a new state of emergency for 54 counties and suspended tolls across Central and Western Florida to allow residents to begin recommended or mandated evacuations. Yet DeSantis also maintained Monday that the registration deadline should not be extended, arguing, “People can register today. There’s nothing inhibiting you registering today. The storm,” meaning Hurricane Milton, “has not hit yet.”
That did not sit well with Florida’s NAACP or its League of Women Voterswhich, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday to extend the registration deadline, arguing that between Helene recovery and Milton preparation, it was “impossible or unduly burdensome” for many Floridians to register by Oct. 7.
In that case, too, a judge held a hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for emergency relief for the afternoon of Oct. 9. He ruled against extending the deadline. As of publication time, the plaintiffs had not decided whether to appeal.
Will Georgians ultimately get the relief South Carolinians have already received — and that Floridians have been thus far denied? Watch this space.
Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
Construction crews could begin the excavation process for what will be President Donald Trump’s massive 250-foot-tall arch in as soon as the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Thursday.
The monument — which will be erected in a traffic circle at the head of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, coming between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery — has generated controversy as concerns emerged about the design and traffic congestion during construction.
The arch would take two to three years to construct on the proposed schedule, according to documents released in June.
“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum said in a social media post.
The 250-foot-tall arch will be among Trump’s most visible projects, as the administration continues its attempts to remake Washington. Critics, however, have voiced fears that the structure may be too large, and overshadow other monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River.
The proposed arch will dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in size. It is unclear at this time how much construction will cost; the National Endowment for the Humanities earmarked $15 million for the monument.
“This will be one the the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington National Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum said.
The monument will be constructed on land overseen by the National Park Service, and critics have argued Trump’s latest project requires explicit congressional approval. However, the Interior secretary continues to rebut these claims.
Instead, Burgum echoed previous statements and said historically “Congress and various congressionally chartered commissions decreed that a monumental work should adorn Columbia Island,” the traffic circle where the monument is planned to be constructed.
“Despite Congress’s intent, the site became and remains today a barren traffic circle lacking any monumental treatment and significant historic value,” he said.
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