Hat-tip to NC Policy Watch for bringing this to our attention:
Hurricane Matthew, hit the eastern part of the state on October 8 and 9 – just a few days before the regular voter registration deadline of October 14. Hurricane Matthew caused over a billion dollars of damage and led to devastating flooding across eastern and coastal North Carolina – an area of the state with large numbers of African-American and low-income voters. By order of a Wake County Superior Court judge, the voter registration deadline was extended by five days to October 19 in the 36 counties that had sustained enough damage to qualify for federal emergency assistance. The SBOE also sent a postcard to over 22,000 voters in the area who had requested mail-in absentee ballots, in hopes of rectifying cases where voters had not received their ballots or had lost them in the flooding, and coordinated with shelters and the postal service to pick up ballots from voters in time.
While the extension and other outreach efforts by the SBOE were helpful, the severe disruption caused by Hurricane Matthew was difficult to mitigate. Many eastern North Carolina voters remained displaced well through Election Day, and a handful of early voting locations and polling places across the impacted region had to be changed as a result of flooding and hurricane damage.
Some of those areas still haven't recovered, some 15 months later. Among many other problems, the effect on voter turnout was devastating. And so was the unnecessary confusion over out-of-precinct voting:
http://ift.tt/2E83Mjv
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