North Carolina residents brave hurricane aftermath on first day of early voting | US elections 2024

In the presidential election battleground of North Carolina, voter turnout in early in-person voting has surged, including in mountainous regions where deadly Hurricane Helene destroyed property and upended lives but apparently lacked a strong desire to vote dampened.

As planned, more than 400 early voting sites opened Thursday for the 17-day period, including all but four of the 80 previously expected sites for the 25 western counties hit hardest by the storm, the state election board's executive director said . Karen Brinson Bell. She praised poll workers — including volunteers affected by the storm — emergency management officials and utility teams.

“I know that thousands of North Carolinians lost so much in this storm. Their lives will never be the same after this tragedy,” Brinson Bell told reporters in Asheville, the region's population center and a city devastated by the historic rains. “But one thing Helene has not taken away from the people of Western North Carolina is the right to vote in this important election.”

Helene's arrival in the southeastern United States three weeks ago decimated remote towns across the Appalachian Mountains and killed at least 246 people, with just over half of the storm-related deaths occurring in North Carolina. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005 and the deadliest overall in the U.S. since Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017.

Several dozen people who died in North Carolina were from Buncombe County, where Asheville is located. Thousands in western North Carolina still have no electricity or clean running water.

But that didn't stop many from voting. About 60 people — most bundled up in jackets, hats and gloves because of the chilly weather — lined up to cast votes at the South Buncombe Library in Asheville before the polls even opened at 9 a.m. Thursday.

Among them was 77-year-old Joyce Rich, who said Helene made early voting more urgent for her. Rich said that while her home was largely spared from the storm, she and her husband still need to do some work on it. Meanwhile, family members who don't have electricity or water come over to shower.

“We decided to just finish it,” Rich said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

In Polk County, an area along the South Carolina border that was also hit by Helene, the county board of elections parking lot was so full of early voters that a poll worker was forced to direct traffic, with debris from the storm still visible .

Voter Joanne Hemmingway, who spent 10 days without power at her home near Tryon, had always planned to vote early and was grateful that election officials were able to pull it off after Helene's strike.

“You don’t have it? “It never occurred to me,” Hemmingway said.

In neighboring Henderson County, officials closed lanes on a major road to ease campaign traffic, and golf carts ferried voters from an auto parts store parking lot to the county's only polling place.

There, voter Michael Dirks said he was looking forward to voting for Helene and expected it to be an important milestone on the road to “a return to normality, whatever that may be.”

In some places, voters waited in line for at least an hour.

Officials in the 25 counties affected by the storm were still evaluating polling locations on Election Day, with the “vast majority” expected to be available to voters, Brinson Bell said. So far, officials have requested tents for about a dozen sites, she added.