As Extreme Weather Disrupts Voting, Could Universal Mail-in Ballots Be a Climate Solution?

Hurricanes, wildfires and other climate-fueled disasters can decrease voter turnout on Election Day, research shows.

When Hurricane Helene tore through the southeastern U.S. in September, parts of Florida and North Carolina were left in shambles. As communities mourned their losses and launched widespread recovery efforts, a presidential election loomed. 

Officials took swift steps to help ensure that residents could still vote. New reports show that these efforts are helping, but only time will tell if and how the hurricane may have disenfranchised voters. 

It’s not the first time weather has thrown a wrench into election plans, and research shows it likely won’t be the last. Experts say that the U.S. needs more measures to secure voters’ rights in the face of climate-fueled extreme weather—and that universal mail-in ballots could be a good place to start. 

Flooding the Polls: Hurricanes, wildfires and other weather events can pose serious physical barriers for voters in the leadup to an election. 

Around Asheville, North Carolina—one of the cities hardest hit by Helene—some residents still don’t have access to reliable power, clean water and transportation five weeks out from the storm. To ensure constituents could still vote, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections enacted several emergency measures such as extending early voting deadlines and changing polling sites. New data reveals record-breaking early voting numbers in North Carolina, as Grist reports. However, an E&E News analysis shows that early voting in most of Georgia counties hit by the hurricane is below the state average.

Similar Election Day scrambles ensued following other cyclones in U.S. history. Hurricane Sandy hit the northeastern U.S. in October 2012—just weeks before the presidential election between then-President Barack Obama and Sen. Mitt Romney—causing widespread flooding and displacing many New Yorkers. Hurricane Katrina brought astonishing levels of destruction to New Orleans ahead of the 2006 mayoral election, decreasing overall turnout. 

However, research shows that some voters showed up to the polls despite the destruction—or, in some cases, because of it. A 2011 study found that registered voters who experienced more than 6 feet of flooding during Hurricane Katrina were more likely to participate in the election than those who experienced less flooding. This was likely due to two factors, according to study co-author R. Michael Alvarez. 

“One is to the extraordinary efforts that were made by many … to make sure that the people who had fled [and] who had experienced the extreme flooding in New Orleans were able to vote,” Alvarez, a professor of political and computational social science at California Institute of Technology, told me. He is the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which aims to study and improve all parts of the voting process.

“We also attribute it to the fact that we think these people were very energized to vote because not only were they dislocated and felt the extreme wrath of the storm, they also wanted to attribute blame and cast their votes to have their voices heard about how they felt about how the city responded to the flooding,” he added. 

Other studies show the same trend after Hurricane Sandy. Now, some Helene-impacted communities echo similar sentiments. But while the storm appears to have increased the motivation of some people to vote, it’s unclear how often it’s changing who and what they vote for; some voters told E&E News that their minds were already made up before the storm. 

Inside Scoop: Other climate-fueled extreme weather trends are influencing voters’ decisions during this presidential election. My colleague Wyatt Myskow, who covers Arizona, visited a few of the polling sites in Phoenix this morning to ask voters their thoughts on heat and drought issues in this key battleground state. Here’s what he learned. 

You’ve Got Mail: In most cases, major natural disasters occurred shortly before an election; it’s a different story if a disaster strikes on Election Day. 

State emergency laws enable some officials to delay an election or modify voting procedures in the event of a catastrophe such as severe floods or terrorist attacks. However, at the federal level, the U.S. Constitution mandates that presidential elections occur on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November (so, today). That means if a large earthquake—or any major weather event, for that matter—hits Southern California on Election Day and prevents people from hitting the polls, their votes may not count. 

“We would have to have some sort of litigation and court-authorized mechanism to extend the voting period,” Alvarez said. “It would have to go through the courts at this point, and the court would have to authorize it. There isn’t any sort of simple way to solve the problem.” 

It’s not just extreme weather that affects voter turnout; a wide body of research shows that even mild autumn showers can deter people from heading to the polls on Election Day. 

According to a 2022 study, there is a strategy that can help combat this: early voting. By analyzing elections from 1948 to 2016 at a county level, researchers found that in-person early voting and no-excuse mail voting mitigates, and in some cases, reverses the negative effect inclement weather has on voter participation. 

“If you make voting more convenient, even in good weather, not surprisingly, people might take up that opportunity,” study co-author Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University and a consultant on election administration, told me. 

He added that this approach became much more popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pew Research Center analyzed votes cast in 49 presidential, state and combined primaries during 2020 elections and found that roughly half of them were mail-in. That adds up to 26.6 million votes. 

Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia currently offer early voting options to all those who are registered. While many areas require an eligible reason for mail-in voting, constituents in a handful of states, including California and Vermont, automatically receive a ballot when they register. One study found that all-mail voting increased voter turnout in Colorado after it was first enacted in 2013, particularly among lower-propensity voting groups such as young people, voters of color and blue-collar workers. This universal voting approach could also be a climate solution in the face of extreme weather, Alvarez said. 

“How we respond when some natural disaster, or man-made disaster, hits right around election season has been a perennial problem, both in terms of how election administrators respond and how academics analyze the effects,” he said. “We are trying to really build resilient systems so that when these kinds of disasters occur … the election process can absorb that hit and still run an election that’s secure, accessible and has a lot of integrity.” 

Cover photo: In October, a line of potential voters waited outside an early voting site in Asheville, North Carolina. Credit: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images