Under the Radar

The Atlantic hurricane season is June 1 to Nov. 30. While both hurricanes and elections can and do occur outside this range, it is worth bearing in mind that most federal elections are conducted during the official hurricane season. Hurricanes have both short-term impacts on voting infrastructure and long-term impacts on voter power in elections. In the short term, hurricanes can down power lines, flood election offices, and force evacuations that leave voters unable to access their polling places. In the long term, prolonged voter displacement and infrastructure damage can weaken a community’s voting power. One Louisiana organizer referred to this as “hurricane-caused voter suppression.”

Because major hurricanes have been repeatedly hitting the Deep South, communities with fewer resources and attention — often Black communities — have trouble rebuilding and recovering between storms. Black voters also tend to spend the greatest amount of time displaced from their communities relative to other demographics. As a result, in Louisiana, following 2020’s Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Delta, the relative voting power of Black Louisianans (their share of the electorate) declined by 9%.

Hurricanes are not a new risk to the Deep South, but recent developments will make them more dangerous. This year, the United States’ ability to accurately forecast hurricanes has been jeopardized due to funding cuts from the federal government. NOAA has failed to regularly conduct air balloon soundings, as a result of drastic staffing reductions. The Department of Defense also ended the use of some of its satellite data for weather forecasting this summer, without explanation. Meanwhile, warming ocean temperatures have been intensifying the severity of hurricanes as they make landfall. Poorer hurricane forecasting capability in a time of intensifying hurricanes endangers lives and livelihoods. It will also complicate voters’ ability to secure their votes prior to a hurricane. A voter cannot plan to take advantage of any available absentee or early voting process if they do not have sufficient notice that a storm is incoming. This puts voters in a worse position of having to attempt to vote after a disaster has already struck, when priorities like physical safety can often take precedence over voting.

Misinformation in the wake of hurricanes is also a serious threat to successful election administration. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, conspiracy theories spread alleging that the hurricane was part of a plot to suppress Republican votes. This type of misinformation is broadly harmful to trust in disaster response. More targeted misinformation can also add to voter confusion, especially when polling places are relocated following a storm. As is, polling place relocation and consolidation in 2018 following Hurricane Michael reduced voter turnout in Florida. If misinformation about the location of polling place closures spreads, as it is likely to do in today’s technological landscape, it may compound the turnout impact that polling place relocation already has.

Hurricanes can generate secondary natural disasters, such as coastal flooding and tornadoes. These disasters and their impacts on the voting process will be explored below.

Tornadoes

The U.S. experiences more tornadoes than any other country on Earth, by a significant margin. Three out of every four tornadoes worldwide happen in the United States. Traditionally, Americans conceive of the Great Plains region as “Tornado Alley.” However, over the past several years, the area of greatest tornado prevalence and intensity has been shifting toward the Southeast, now known as “Dixie Alley.” This region encompasses almost all of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as the northern parts of Louisiana and Georgia and the southern parts of Arkansas and Tennessee. Alabama, in particular, has had more violent tornadoes (EF5 tornadoes) than any other state in the nation, and has suffered the highest number of tornado-related fatalities. Put differently: 31% of Mississippians and 25% of Alabamians are in the highest risk category for tornadoes.

Neither Mississippi nor Alabama allow early in-person voting. Both states nominally provide absentee ballot access, but it is heavily restricted. This means that point-in-time disasters like tornadoes have the potential to devastate the voting process if they occur on Election Day itself, since voters may have had no other opportunity to vote in that election. Meanwhile, tornadoes in Mississippi and Alabama are even harder to predict than tornadoes elsewhere, due to the topography and forested nature of the region. This means that the window of time that election supervisors have to react to an incoming tornado is dangerously small. Advance planning, training and equipment are crucial to ensuring voting can continue as tornado risks increase.

While tornadoes in the South are somewhat more likely to happen from February to April, notable tornadoes have struck in the winter and fall as well. This means that it is possible for tornadoes to interact with traditional November elections, though it is even more likely that they will impact primary elections, municipal elections and runoff elections. Super Tuesday 2020 saw severe tornados impacting voting in both Tennessee and Alabama. However, in Bibb County, Alabama, battery backups for voting machines allowed voting to continue with minimal disruption despite the damage to the power grid caused by the storm. This case shows the value of providing emergency and backup equipment to election administrators to allow for resilience in the case of natural disasters. The primary elections held on Super Tuesday have been impacted by Southern tornadoes more than once. Notably, in 2008, five people in Alabama died following the Super Tuesday tornadoes. In that case, voting was able to continue in Alabama, but only by sheer luck, because the tornado did not hit until after polls closed.

Coastal Flooding

Among the Deep South states, Louisiana and Florida have the greatest vulnerability to coastal flooding. In Louisiana alone, 1.9 million residents are at elevated risk for experiencing coastal flooding. Coastal flooding occurs when high tides or storm surge drive seawater over land; such flooding can often occur as a result of a tropical hurricane or a cyclone, and can be the most dangerous outcome of the storm. The majority of deaths from Hurricane Katrina, for example, were not caused by the severe winds, but instead by the storm surge and subsequent flooding. Coastal flooding does not have to be coupled with storms, however; so-called sunny day flooding (flooding caused by high tides and rising sea levels) occurs frequently in the Deep South, as well.

Coastal flooding can obstruct a voter’s ability to access the voting booth because of the way in which such flooding impedes transportation. Impassable roads make access to an in-person polling place difficult or impossible, while mail delivery is also significantly hindered. Flooded roads can be made usable in a matter of days, which means that when there is a long enough early voting period, transportation issues need not impact voter access for the entire voting period. However, in most years, Louisiana’s early voting period is only one week long. And of course, other states in the Deep South do not provide an early voting period at all.

Even if the water recedes quickly, water damage to machinery can be a serious issue, given the number of separate technological components in a modern-day voting process. The list of voting equipment that could malfunction or fail due to water damage includes but is not limited to ballot marking devices, poll pads and ballot scanners. Many types of voter identification are also not waterproof; flooding damage to a voter’s home may damage their driver’s license or other form of identification as well.

Coastal flooding can be considered more predictable than other types of natural disasters, like rainwater-driven flooding or tornadoes. To that end, hardening polling locations (reducing their vulnerabilities and making them “harder” targets) against coastal flooding in places where coastal flooding is all but guaranteed is an investment worth making, and making soon.

Riverine Flooding

Riverine flooding disrupts the voting process just as coastal flooding does. However, unlike coastal flooding, riverine flooding risk is not confined to a small number of counties. Instead, all five Deep South states contain regions with high riverine flooding risks. Of course, the dangers of riverine flooding are greatest around the Mississippi River itself, as it runs through Louisiana and Mississippi. While coastal flooding is often associated with a specific, named hurricane or storm, some of the most notable riverine flooding events in the Deep South are precipitated by “no-name storms,” whose lack of name recognition in turn reduces public awareness before the disaster strikes.

Louisiana’s August 2016 floods were generated by four days of torrential rainstorms, which released 7.1 trillion gallons of water onto the state. By the end, 10 of the states’ rivers had flooded; the Vermilion River changed direction and flooded water upstream. East Baton Rouge parish saw its polling places completely inundated with water. An investigation from the Center for Public Integrity showed that prior to the floods, the parish authorities had plans in place to relocate five polling locations, only one of which was majority-Black. However, after the floods poured in, the parish moved 19 polling locations; 15 of them were majority-Black precincts. Majority-Black precincts’ voters saw the largest increase in distance to their new polling places.

This incident illustrates the ways in which natural disasters can exacerbate Black voter suppression, even as the disaster itself impacts voters of all races. Strong baseline protections for ballot access can help ensure riverine flooding and other natural disasters do not exacerbate inequitable access.

Wildfires

Much like tornadoes, wildfires are a disaster typically associated with a different region of the country: the American West. However, the Deep South experiences and will continue to experience dangerous wildfires. Parts of Georgia, Florida and Louisiana are all at the highest level of risk for wildfires. This year, 48,000 acres were consumed by a wildfire in western Broward County, in Florida’s Everglades. This is not new; the 1998 Florida wildfires in Flagler County still rank among the state’s most devastating natural disasters of all time.

That said, wildfire risk in the Deep South is worsening, partly due to the spread of invasive species like pine beetles and cogongrass, which, due to their maladaptation to local conditions, present higher flammability risks. The South’s wildfire risk is compounded by the other natural hazard risks the region faces. When Hurricane Helene struck, for example, it damaged and killed huge swaths of trees, which created large amounts of combustible debris. Meanwhile, heat waves exacerbate droughts, and the historic droughts of 2023 significantly exacerbated fire risk in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Such conditions enabled Louisiana’s 2023 Tiger Island Fire, the largest in the state’s history, to grow as rapidly as it did.

Wildfires have the potential to impact the voting system in two ways. First, they directly destroy polling locations and displace voters, through the same mechanisms discussed earlier with hurricanes and tornadoes. But second, they create a level of health hazard in adjacent areas that makes in-person voting of any kind dangerous. Inhaling wildfire smoke can cause health impacts for anyone, but it is particularly unsafe for people with asthma, people with cardiovascular disease, and people who are pregnant — all groups who may not receive disability accommodations for voting. Older people for severe health risks from wildfire smoke. This group is also critical to the functioning of elections, because poll workers have typically been disproportionately older on average than the general population.

California has repeatedly accommodated wildfire-impacted voters by leaning on its robust mail voting infrastructure, an option which several Deep South states do not currently provide. However, mobile voting units have also been used in the West as a creative way to reach displaced or endangered voters. The Santa Cruz County VoteMobile, described humorously as a “taco truck” for voting, provided an in-person voting option for communities devastated by wildfires. Mobile voting units are not without precedent in the Deep South; Fulton County, Georgia, used two such units during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. However, the subsequent passage of SB 202 in Georgia prevented the use of mobile voting units unless the governor had declared a state of emergency.

Conclusion

The risk to the Deep South from these natural disasters is only becoming more serious. Now is the time to take action to protect our voters and our elections.

Policymakers should:

• Dedicate specific and ongoing funding for supplies like generators and battery backups, strategic election equipment reserves, and other infrastructure that can make election offices and polling locations more disaster-resilient. This funding should be both robust and adequate.
• Harden polling locations in known high-risk areas to reduce predictable water, fire and wind damage.
• Implement flexible voting options across the Deep South, so that voters may use options like extended early voting, no-excuse absentee voting, or mobile voting to vote safely and proactively.
• Adopt standards for the equitable implementation of emergency responses, such as polling place relocations, so that BIPOC communities are not disparately impacted.
• Create strong health and safety protections for poll workers, so that elections can continue to function without endangering this critical and vulnerable group.

Further research into other types of natural disasters and their impacts on elections is needed. A specific study and assessment to evaluate the impact of emergency election responses on BIPOC communities will be particularly critical. Additionally, advocates and policymakers must develop state-specific recommendations and best practices tailored to community needs.

Acknowledgements

Additional thanks to Brenda Gonzalez Guerrero, Brian Darmitzel, Rafaela Demerath, Chris Hunter and Will Maddock at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy for their exploratory research into this issue on behalf of the SPLC. Their work was integral in shaping this report.

Illustration at top by Matt Rota.