RALEIGH, N.C. — Voters in western North Carolina impacted by Hurricane Helene’s devastation may see several changes to how they can cast their ballots in the coming weeks after the state’s election board approved an emergency resolution that modifies voting rules.

The resolution unanimously passed by the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which has both Democratic and Republican members, on Monday comes less than two weeks after Helene destroyed large swaths of western North Carolina — displacing residents, damaging homes and washing away roads.

In a critical presidential election that may hinge on which way the battleground state swings, that widespread disruption also presents major problems for how residents can cast their votes by Nov. 5.

Still, the board reiterated several times during Monday’s meeting that it was committed to ensuring early voting and Election Day happens on schedule across the state, while also making sure “no one is denied the right to vote because of these logistical problems,” said board chairman Alan Hirsch, who is a Democrat.

“I’m generally very hesitant to make changes to the normal running of our election,” said Republican member Stacy Eggers IV, who is from Boone in western North Carolina. “But these have been tailored to give flexibility to the county boards to meet those specific needs.”

The resolution outlines 13 counties in western North Carolina that have polling places or mailing services that were “severely disrupted” by Helene, either because of damage, inaccessibility, using locations for disaster relief or lack of staff. As of Monday, all county elections offices were open, executive director Karen Brinson Bell said.

One of the biggest changes in the resolution allows voters to turn in absentee ballots by 7:30 p.m. to Election Day polling places operated by their county elections board. Displaced voters may also turn in ballots to another county’s elections board by the same deadline. Previously, voters could only turn in absentee ballots to their county elections board or the state board on Election Day.

The resolution also expands opportunities to pick up an absentee ballot in-person from a county elections office until the day before the election.

Absentee ballot distribution already faced issues before Helene hit North Carolina. A legal battle over whether to include Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name on ballots after he suspended his presidential campaign — which ultimately resulted in taking off his name and reprinting ballots — caused about a two-week delay in September.

With a bipartisan majority vote, county elections boards in the affected areas can approve several changes to Election Day polling locations. Measures that could be considered — which need approval from the state board’s executive director — include transferring voters to other in-county precincts, creating out-of-precinct polling locations in other counties and establishing multiple voting locations within a precinct.

Similarly, those boards can also make changes to early voting sites affected by the storm. Those modifications can include adding new sites or removing ones that are inaccessible, as well as adjusting site hours.

Voters in the area must be notified of changes by mail, according to the resolution. Boards must also share the changes with local media, county political parties and on their county website.

To address a potential lack of poll workers, counties are authorized to select election officials from other counties who are registered to vote in North Carolina. Assistance teams may also be deployed to emergency relief shelters to help voters with absentee voting.

Despite calls from civil rights groups to extend voter registration deadlines in states impacted by Helene, the resolution didn’t include a measure to do so. That decision, along with possible adjustments to what the state board approved, will be left to the state legislature to consider when it reconvenes on Wednesday to pass disaster relief legislation.

In the coming weeks, Bell said the board may need to consider further actions as the affected counties continue to experience disruptions through Election Day.

• Officials are urging people to stop spreading misinformation amid Hurricane Helene recovery efforts.
• Both Republicans and Democrats have called out misinformation and false rumors.
• Donald Trump and Elon Musk have amplified false claims.

As rescue workers respond to the destruction in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, government officials on both sides of the aisle are calling for a misinformation cease-fire.

Since the hurricane made landfall in Florida and swept up to the Carolinas, the storm itself has been swept up in another powerful force: American politics in a presidential election year.

Some social media users are sharing unsubstantiated claims, some accompanied by fake AI-generated photos, criticizing the response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the government’s disaster relief group, and, by extension, the administration of President Joe Biden.

“It’s not necessarily unusual for emergency situations to be breeding grounds for mis- and disinformation, but I do think we’ve seen a particularly large amount of false claims proliferating at this time,” Mekela Panditharatne, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit policy institute at New York University’s School of Law, told Business Insider. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s so close to a very consequential national election.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, has posted on his social media network saying that “FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help” and has reposted similar claims from others.

Musk shared another claim that Asheville, North Carolina’s airspace had been closed to block recovery efforts, prompting a fact-check from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who said the Federal Aviation Administration was not shutting down the airspace. Buttigieg told Musk to call him with any issues, and after they spoke on the phone, Musk posted that flights were underway and thanked Buttigieg.

Trump has seized on the disaster to criticize the Biden administration and, by extension, his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money” and “spent it all on illegal migrants,” the Washington Post reported.

His comments came after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said FEMA would need more money from Congress to get it through the rest of hurricane season.

A Washington Post investigation found no evidence that the Biden administration used disaster relief funds on the migrant crisis. However, amid hurricane season in 2019, Trump himself approved using $155 million in disaster relief funds for immigration detention at the border, the Post reported.

Bipartisan calls to stop spreading ‘junk’ information

Following the spike in false rumors, FEMA created a searchable fact-checking page to tackle misinformation about the relief efforts. In North Carolina, the Department of Public Safety also shared a fact-check on social media, which Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has reposted.

Republicans have also joined the fight against the false information. Kevin Corbin, a Republican member of the North Carolina Senate, issued a plea on Facebook for people to stop spreading “conspiracy theory junk.” He listed bizarre claims that he said he and other officials have heard, ranging from accusations that “FEMA is stealing money from donations” to the “government is controlling the weather from Antarctica.”

“It is just a distraction to people trying to do their job,” Corbin wrote.

US Sen. Thom Tillis, also a Republican, echoed Corbin’s comments on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on CBS News on Sunday. He said many of the claims are “not even from people on the ground” and complicate rescue and recovery operations.

“It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their life,” Tillis said. “Quite honestly, most of what I’ve seen out there is a distraction and not helping the core of the effort right here, which is to save lives and start rebuilding.”

Panditharatne told BI that the spread of misinformation can “dissuade people from seeking the assistance that they need in this time of crisis.”

“It’s perfectly legitimate to express an opinion or criticize the sufficiency of a response, but a number of the claims that we are seeing, particularly from high profile actors and politicians, are baseless, and they’re contradicting verifiable facts or unsubstantiated by evidence,” she said. “Where that is the case, I think it can divert public information and resources and demoralize officials on the ground.”

In a crisis, there may be gaps in available information, creating a vacuum for misinformation to “flood in to fill the void,” Panditharatne said. However, she added that’s not an excuse.

“I think anyone like Musk, who has a significant influence over the information ecosystem, should feel a sense of responsibility to promote information that doesn’t undermine people’s ability to access the aid that they need or undermine officials’ response to a crisis,” she said.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for X also did not immediately respond.

As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.

“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”

Hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast U.S. after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm. Helene brought heavy rain and catastrophic flooding to communities across multiple states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of the destruction. Officials previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina were washed out and inaccessible after the storm, hampering rescue operations, and several highways were blocked by mudslides. 

Tillis said Sunday that most roads in the region likely remained closed due to flooding and debris. Water, electricity and other essential services still have not been fully restored.

“The scope of this storm is more like Katrina,” he said. “It may look like a flood to the outside observer, but again, this is a landmass roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, with damage distributed throughout. We have to get maximum resources on the ground immediately to finish rescue operations.”

Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead after it slammed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding neighborhoods and destroying infrastructure in and around New Orleans as well as in parts of the surrounding region. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. in the last 50 years, and the costliest storm on record. 

The death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 232, CBS News has confirmed, with at least 116 of those deaths reported in North Carolina alone. Officials have said they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts were ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police department in Asheville told CBS News Friday their officers were “actively working 75 cases of missing persons.” 

On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released $100 million in emergency funds for North Carolina to rebuild the roads and bridges damaged by the hurricane.

“We are providing this initial round of funding so there’s no delay getting roads repaired and reopened, and re-establishing critical routes,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration will be with North Carolina every step of the way, and today’s emergency funding to help get transportation networks back up and running safely will be followed by additional federal resources.”     

President Biden previously announced that the federal government would cover “100%” of costs for debris removal and emergency protective measures in North Carolina for six months.

With North Carolina leaders working with a number of relief agencies to deal with the aftermath of the storm, Tillis urged federal officials to ramp up the resources being funneled into the state’s hardest-hit areas. The senator also addressed a surge in conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Biden Administration’s disaster response, which have been fueled by Republican political figures like former President Donald Trump.

Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the November presidential election, were diverting funds from Federal Emergency Management Agency that would support the relief effort in North Carolina toward initiatives for immigrants. He also said baselessly that the administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were withholding funds because many communities that were hit hardest are predominantly Republican. Elon Musk has shared false claims about FEMA, too.

“Many of these observations are not even from people on the ground,” Tillis said of those claims. “I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don’t need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”