Opinion: Helene’s damage tests election officials. Trump isn’t helping.

With the scale of deadly devastation from Hurricane Helene now coming into focus, the easy path here would be to center attention on the infuriating circus that Donald Trump tried to bring Monday to Georgia with his typical toxic brew of lies, distortions and self-aggrandizement.
But we’re five weeks away from the general election. And our attention is much better spent on the professional election administrators who are still very much hard at work, despite the former president’s nearly decade-long attempts to vilify them (with zero actual evidence).
Consider Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, and Paul Cox, the board’s general counsel. They told journalists in a conference call Tuesday that they’re still trying to reach local election officials and poll workers in some of their state’s 100 counties, especially in the mountainous western region, which took the brunt of Helene’s hardest hits.
“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Brinson Bell said. “The destruction is unprecedented, and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.”
And yet, I have to say, she sounded undaunted by the tasks ahead.
Ten county election offices are closed due to the storm and must be made operational again. Absentee voting is already underway, and North Carolina had more than 256,000 requests for ballots as of Tuesday. The deadline to register to vote in North Carolina is Oct. 11.
In-person early voting starts Oct. 17.
Brinson Bell was asked if she is worried voters will lose faith in election results as her team was scrambling to do their jobs while cellphone service is spotty, electricity and clean water are at least days away in places, and roads have been washed away. She cited voting that happened in tents in a coastal county after a 2019 hurricane.
“I hope that this helps them have more faith in the results and in what we do,” Brinson Bell said. “Elections people are resilient, just like the people that live in the mountains. And we have prepared for delivering voting.”
This is what makes Trump’s constant stream of lies about elections and attacks on the people who run them so dishonorable. Elections administrators handle all kinds of complexity to deliver accurate results in the best of circumstances. They work even harder in the face of disaster.
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Other states hit by Helene are also pushing forward toward Election Day while facing serious challenges.
Doug Kufner, a spokesperson for the Tennessee secretary of state, told me that at least six polling places in the northeastern section of his state were damaged or inaccessible due to road or bridge damage, and that the number may rise with further evaluation.
But, like North Carolina, Tennessee has faith in its plans and procedures to go forward. Early in-person voting starts in two weeks.
“The election community in Tennessee is united; when one hurts, we all hurt,” Kufner said. “The heartache, shock and devastation are massive.”
TJ Lundeen from the South Carolina Election Commission told me, “There are still many areas of the state without power, with restoration timelines stretching throughout this week and next week.”
Early voting in South Carolina starts Oct. 21.
“We anticipate there will be changes required to early voting centers and polling locations,” Lundeen said. “We just don’t have that information as of now.”
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Mark Ard from the Florida Department of State told me that his agency is still accessing damages “to infrastructure of polling places” and the ability for poll workers to handle their Election Day duties. And the state is working with the U.S. Postal Service “regarding concerns about elections information and vote-by-mail ballots.”
Trump, who so often attacks voting that doesn’t take place on Election Day, votes early in Florida and has been urging his supporters to use mail ballots – while simultaneously attacking the practice.
Robert Sinners, spokesperson for Georgia’s secretary of state, told me: “We aren’t anticipating any prolonged impacts from the hurricane” on the election.
Georgia did have to deal with the Republican presidential nominee’s visit Monday, when his rhetorical crosswinds showed an incapacity for compassion in the face of disaster. Trump, in a post on his social media site Truth Social, said he would also visit North Carolina soon and accused the federal government and the governor of that state, a Democrat, of “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
But in a bored and monotonous reading of a speech in Valdosta, Georgia, Trump claimed to be striving for unity: “We’re not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved.”
Trump was pointedly asked by NBC News for evidence to substantiate his allegations about withheld help. The former one-term president could only mutter a meek “take a look” in response.
Trump also lied Monday about the Republican governor of Georgia, whom he has attacked and embraced, having trouble getting the White House on the phone. Gov. Brian Kemp had already said earlier in the day that he had no trouble getting in touch with President Joe Biden.
Biden plans to visit North Carolina on Wednesday after saying Sunday that he was waiting so as to not “disrupt emergency response operations.”
Vice President Kamala Harris cut short a campaign trip to return to Washington, D.C., for briefings on the hurricane. The Democratic presidential nominee will travel to Georgia on Wednesday to survey the damage and is expected to visit North Carolina soon.
Two weeks ago, Brinson Bell and other swing-state election administrators gathered in Michigan to discuss their aspirations and anxieties about the Nov. 5 general election. Disinformation about voter fraud and the distrust those lies create about the results were a serious concern, they told me.
I asked Brinson Bell and Cox on Tuesday about the potential for disinformation to flood the election process with lies as they work to collect and count the ballots. Brinson Bell said North Carolina is confident in the “uniform processes” it has been using since 2006.
Cox added a word of caution while not calling out any individual sources of election disinformation. “Consider the source,” he warned. It’s advice every voter in every state should heed.
“Tune out all the noise out there,” Cox said. “Because there are a lot of people out there putting out messages that are not official messages, that are not vetted messages, that they’re putting it out there because they have a political ax to grind.”
The noise is coming from Trump. By Monday, he was whining on the Fox Nation streaming service that the hurricane “hurt a lot of my voters” while repeating his lie that the Biden-Harris administration was not helping.
Trump’s limited, ego-addled bandwidth can only perceive a disaster that has killed nearly 150 people as a terrible thing that happened to him and an opportunity to lie his way to an advantage.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan