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

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. 

Though the temperature had cooled to 49 degrees Fahrenheit on Election Day morning, voters in the nation’s hottest major city still had extreme heat on their minds. 

I headed out early to Phoenix’s Burton Barr Library, located in the heart of the city and home to one of its 24/7 heat relief centers during the summer, to talk to voters. Arizona is one of the key swing states either presidential candidate needs to win to claim the presidency, and it’s home to multiple tight races that will decide the fate of Congress—and how the U.S. will address climate change in the coming years. As Mayor Kate Gallego told reporters at the library this morning, Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, has “been the path to the presidency.”

Though abortion, immigration, housing and democracy have been top issues for most residents in the state, climate change is still shaping people’s votes. Phoenix has had back-to-back record-breaking hot summers. This year saw 113 straight days of temperatures reaching at least 100 degrees each day, shattering the national record, while lows consistently stayed in the 90s. Until a few weeks ago, the heat lingered. So far, it’s killed 466 people this year, with 191 more deaths under investigation by the county’s medical examiner. 

“When the Saguaros are dying, something is abnormal,” Ed Kearns told me after he voted, referring to the iconic cactuses famed for their long green bodies and waving arms that dot the state and live for hundreds of years despite extreme temperatures and little rainfall. But climate change is driving their decline, with many across the state dying from the heat and wildfires, which are both too extreme even for the tenacious species.

Born and raised in the state, Kearns said this was the hottest summer he had experienced. The heat has increased his monthly electricity bill and killed his plants in his yard. He said he voted for Democrats up and down the ballot, as the party at least acknowledges the change is happening.

Other voters I spoke to echoed a similar sentiment. In a year of so many important issues, addressing the changing climate, at least in this portion of the city, was a priority. But extreme heat wasn’t the only climate issue getting attention. For Amy Francisco, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, drought and water availability was a top issue. 

Climate change is driving bigger and longer droughts in the state. Arizona’s aquifers have largely been tapped dry, while the state also intensely debates the future of the Colorado River—a major source of water for seven states, 30 Indigenous tribes, 40 million people and some of the most productive farms in the country. Many of the tribes across the West have limited access to water and are still fighting to have their water rights finalized. On the Navajo Nation, for example, many homes do not have running water. The Tohono O’odham fought for decades to have their water rights settled.

“Those are the basic comforts we take for granted,” Francisco said, and yet so many living on the reservation still do not have access to running water and have to haul water in. It’s an issue only growing more worrisome in the face of the region’s drought. 

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.” 

More Top Climate News 

The United Nations biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, concluded over the weekend, and reviews were mixed. After two weeks of negotiations, member countries agreed to establish a subsidiary body for Indigenous peoples to consult on nature conservation decisions, Steven Grattan reports for The Associated Press. Delegates also pulled together enough votes to create a fund that will allocate some of the profits from nature’s genetic information—which is often used by pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies—into biodiversity conservation. 

But countries failed to reconcile one of the conference’s main agenda items: establishing a global fund for nature. Last week, I wrote about why countries were at odds about how to fill the $700 billion funding gap for preventing ecological collapse—a debate that continues on. Environmental organizations are speaking out against this gridlock. 

“It’s tragic that nations failed to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to saving biodiversity, and we’ll all suffer from this failure,” Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit, told me over email. “If we don’t make big changes and devote the necessary resources, we’ll fall even further behind in the race to save life on Earth. This is a scary place to be.”

The Spanish region of Valencia is asking the Spanish government for $34.2 billion to recover from last week’s devastating floods, which killed more than 200 people. In just one day, some areas of Valencia experienced more rainfall than they do in a typical year. According to initial estimates, the onslaught damaged more than 100,000 cars and the cost of overall insured damages is expected to be above $1.09 billion, Macarena Munoz Montijano reports for Bloomberg. Yesterday, the nearby city of Barcelona was inundated with rain and remains on high alert. 

A recent study found that sea ice is damaging polar bears’ feet in parts of Canada and Greenland—and climate change may be to blame. The researchers identified bears across these regions with cuts, hair loss and ice build-up on fur and feet that make it difficult for the animals to walk, Kieran Mulvaney reports for National Geographic. The study proposes a few theories for why this is happening, including more rain or warming temperatures causing slushy ice.

To leave you with a bit of good news: The Edinburgh zoo announced the birth of a pygmy hippo, an endangered mammal native to West Africa. The species was thrown into the spotlight following the birth of internet sensation “Moo Deng” at Thailand’s Khao Kheow open zoo. The new baby is named Haggis, like the traditional Scottish pudding delicacy.