RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper signed the state’s first relief package into law on Thursday Hurricane Helene devastation, allocating $273 million for immediate needs and providing flexibility for agencies and displaced residents.
The Democrat signed the measure, which was unanimously approved on Wednesday by the Republican-dominated General Assembly. Nearly all of the money will provide the state’s portion of funding necessary to meet the federal government’s requirements for state and local disaster assistance programs. Other money will be used in part to ensure public school nutrition workers at closed schools get paid and to help officials organize elections in the battleground state in the coming weeks.
“Recovery for Western North Carolina will require unprecedented help from state and federal sources and this legislation is a strong first step,” Cooper said in a news release. The Legislature also agreed separately Wednesday to return to Raleigh on Oct. 24, when action on additional recovery legislation is expected.
The $273 million in Wednesday’s bill comes from the state’s savings reserve, which contained $4.75 billion. The measure issued also waived fees for people in western provinces to replace lost driver’s licenses and identification cards, as well as requirements for some highway repairs and open burning of storm debris.
The General Assembly extensive rule changes to conduct elections and return ballots from 13 hard-hit counties, as approved earlier this week by the State Board of Elections, to 25 counties with nearly 1.3 million registered voters. The 25 cover almost all provinces under the federal disaster declaration.
Election officials are in the final stages of assessing the extent of damage at the region’s 540 polling places on Election Day, Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, told reporters Thursday. Some of these voting locations could be replaced with tents, trailers or motor coaches, Bell said.
Under the new rules, voters registered in the 25 counties, for example, can request an absentee ballot in person from their county election office until the day before Election Day, giving them several more days to gain access.
The legislation also changed the options displaced people in the region have for returning absentee ballots. The law specifies that absentee ballots received by voters in the 25 counties can be returned to any open early voting site or county election office in the state, as well as to the State Board of Elections office in Raleigh.
The legislation blocked an additional option approved by the state board this week that would have allowed these voters to drop off absentee ballots at polling places on Election Day in their home states, when they were open on Election Day, council counsel said Paul Cox Thursday.
The first absentee ballots were mailed to those who requested them a few days before Helene arrived in North Carolina, raising the threat that some ballots would be destroyed by flooding. Due to postal service disruptions, personal requests and returns may also be preferred.
Friday’s statewide registration deadline to vote by mail or on Election Day remains in effect, but voters can already simultaneously register to vote and cast ballots in their home states at early voting locations open from October 17 to November 2.
Seventy-five of the 80 early voting locations approved for use in the 25 counties before the storm will begin operating next week, Brinson Bell said. A handful of locations still require portable toilets, generators and internet access, she added.
Brinson Bell, who has lived in the mountains for 20 years, pointed out that the state has held elections in the past after other natural disasters and during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“It’s certainly harder to navigate this election through such devastation. But our processes work, and we just practice what we know how to do,” she said. “And that’s why we’re going to be able to get all North Carolina residents to vote.”