Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has called for a number of moves to “enact an expansion of voter access for North Carolinians” living in areas that have been hit by Hurricane Helene.
Their proposals would make it easier to vote via absentee ballot, allow the use of “temporary structures” as voting locations, waive “the uniformity requirement for Early Voting site times” and remove “the residency requirement for poll workers to serve in the affected counties.”
North Carolina was badly hit by Hurricane Helene which crashed into the southeastern United States on September 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing at least 230 deaths as it left a trail of devastation across a number of states.
Trump won North Carolina by just over 1 percent in 2020 and the state is widely regarded as one of the key battlegrounds that will decide the 2024 presidential election winner.
In total, the Trump campaign asked Governor Roy Cooper, a Republican, and the GOP-controlled North Carolina General Assembly to implement 10 changes to “ensure the people who have already suffered from the storm don’t lose their right to participate in this important election.”
The changes would extend access to Election Day voting locations to “any voter in the impacted county,” expand bipartisan election official teams to “assist displaced voters in requesting and delivering absentee ballots,” and allow voters who have been displaced to deliver their absentee ballot to a different county or state board.
Absentee ballots delivered to a different county board should be returned to the voter’s original county board “as soon as possible.”
Voters displaced to a different county should also be able to vote via “provisional ballot on Election Day,” the “uniformity requirements for Early Voting site times” would be waived allowing for Sunday voting and county boards would be permitted to use “temporary structures as voting locations during Early Voting and on Election Day.”
Donald Trump on October 7, 2024, in Doral, Florida. The former president’s campaign is seeking “an expansion of voter access for North Carolinians” following Hurricane Helene.
Joe Raedle/GETTY
In addition, residency requirements for poll workers would be waived in affected counties, as would the “county residency requirement for poll observers to be appointed by the county political party chair.”
These new measures should be communicated “via digital, radio, broadcast, and text,” with funding made available for this to happen.
The move comes despite senior Republicans pushing for tighter voting restrictions on a national level following the contested 2020 presidential election. Trump is continuing to insist the 2020 ballot, which he lost to President Joe Biden, was rigged against him, though his attempts to invalidate the result have been repeatedly rejected in court.
Notably, the Trump campaign’s push for easier absentee ballot voting in North Carolina comes despite their candidate being a staunch critic of mail-in voting, commenting in January: “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots, because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.”
Trump made similar remarks in March when he said: “Any time the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating.”
In 2020, Trump performed relatively poorly with mail-in ballots in key states such as Pennsylvania, where Biden won the mail-in and absentee votes by more than 50 points, while the Republican incumbent won with Election Day voters.
Republicans bids to restrict the use of ballot drop boxes, which Trump suggested could lead to “a rigged election,” sparked legal battles ahead of the 2020 presidential election in Texas and Pennsylvania.
Newsweek contacted representatives of Trump‘s 2024 presidential election campaign for comment via email on Wednesday outside of regular office hours.
