Hurricane Helene Wreaks Further Chaos on North Carolina Voting

North Carolina may struggle to send out mail-in ballots following the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Helene and chaos wrought by former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. 

The United States Postal Service announced Sunday that operations at more than two dozen facilities across North Carolina had been suspended due to the effects of Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm has caused widespread flooding, killing more than 100 people across several Southern states. 

North Carolina’s early voting had previously been delayed by Kennedy’s efforts to have his name removed from the ballot, after more than one million ballots had already been printed. 

Although Kennedy’s request was denied at first, the state Supreme Court ultimately ordered that the ballots be reprinted, delaying the beginning of early voting by two weeks, costing the state thousands of dollars, and shortening the legally required voting period.  

Kennedy has plainly stated that he intends to get his name off the ballot in states where its presence would detract from Donald Trump—such as North Carolina, a key battleground state. 

As a result of Kennedy’s plot to see Trump elected president, military ballots for the state were sent out on September 20, and roughly 190,000 absentee ballots were mailed out on September 24. Now it’s unclear when these ballots will arrive with voters.

Hurricane Helene demonstrates the existential threat of a changing climate to a democratically held election. This catastrophic storm could have other effects on election administration by potentially destroying voters’ ballots, displacing poll workers, and damaging voting sites.

North Carolina’s voter ID law does contain an exemption for victims of a natural disaster within 100 days of an election who cannot produce identification. 

Last week, the North Carolina state Board of Elections announced that it had removed 747,274 names from its voter rolls since 2023, mostly people who had moved from one county to another and people who had not voted in the last two federal elections, according to WECT. 

Donald Trump is continuing to hitch himself to Project 2025’s policy proposals, even after he spent months working to publicly disavow the Christian nationalist manifesto.

During a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated a key talking point of the 920-page executive branch blueprint: dismantling the Department of Education. But this time, Trump offered the radical policy shift with a candid dismissal, asking the crowd, “What the hell do you have to lose?”

“You know I’m gonna take the Department of Education, close it in Washington, let the states run their own education,” he said. “Very important. Because we spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list.”

Neither of those points are true. A 2023 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that while the U.S. did spend 38 percent more per student than the average of other member countries, it still ranked behind Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and the Republic of Korea for its per-pupil spending. And America’s education system doesn’t rank last, either—instead, it ranks twenty-second out of 41 countries, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index.

“So, you know the expression? What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump added, shortly before blaming the current state of America’s education system on incoming migrants.

Last week, Trump shared his vision for the country’s education system without the massive federal agency guiding it. According to him, some states will “do very good,” while others will, admittedly, be “terrible.”

“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

Project 2025 has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling wholesale staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

In July, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who is behind it.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

After a judge ordered that Alex Jones’s media company, including his infamous InfoWars, be sold for parts, the conservative conspiracy theorist begged his followers to buy the assets so he could continue the show.

However, in doing so, Jones invited his enemies to do just the same.

According to reporting by Semafor, multiple left-leaning media companies and nonprofit organizations are interested in courting benefactors to help them acquire Jones’s website, social media, and equipment. One of those groups is media watchdog group Media Matters for America, which said they’d explore bidding on InfoWars.

“We are diligently considering this acquisition,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA in an email to Semafor. “As we saw with the Tucker tapes, the archives could contain unbroadcasted material that ends up having real news value—not schadenfreude—but actually useful information.”

A handful of other left-leaning media companies have shown similar interest in courting donors to aid in an acquisition, including the Texas-based digital publication The Barbed Wire. Earlier this week, Brian Krassenstein also said he would submit a bid. “Once I win it, I will call it MissInfoWars and rehire Alex Jones, but make him dress up as ‘Alexa Jones’ and tell fairy tales,” he wrote on X earlier this week. When asked about his plan to buy the site, Krassenstein told Semafor it was a joke and out of his budget but added, “Maybe we will get lucky.”

Jones must sell his assets to pay off the nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress judgments owed to families affected by the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, after he called victims and their parents “crisis actors.”

Much of InfoWars will go up for sale November 13, with the remaining assets being sold in December so both Jones and his enemies have time to get organized for the auction. In the meantime, Jones might have luck continuing to bug billionaire and friend Elon Musk to help him out.

Donald Trump tried to blame Joe Biden for the small crowd size at one of his rallies this weekend.

A Trump rally in Wisconsin on Saturday was moved to an indoor location at the last minute, after the Secret Service said it could not properly staff an outdoor event, given that many of its agents were in New York providing security to dignitaries at the U.N. General Assembly.

Trump provided his own spin on the proceedings during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. The Republican nominee claimed that plans for a large rally the day before had been scrapped because the Biden administration “would not let us have the people” necessary to guard the event.

The former president claimed he’d been prevented from holding an outdoor rally in front of the 50,000 people who allegedly showed up, and instead had to settle for a smaller 1,000-person rally inside. So 49,000 people had just gone home, then? (The average size of a Trump rally is 5,600 people.)

“But we had 50,000 people that showed up, but they didn’t want me to be outside. They said they couldn’t get us enough people because they were guarding the United Nations, and Iran, the president of Iran is here,” Trump said, as the crowd booed.

During the presidential debate earlier this month, Kamala Harris urged viewers to attend a Trump rally and see for themselves that Trump’s crowds were smaller and attendees often left early due to “exhaustion and boredom.”

This line of attack seemed to get under Trump’s skin, to the point that he’s now trying to explain away the phenomenon. Trump claimed that people don’t “ever leave” his events, and that when they do, he finishes his speeches quickly. Many of Trump’s speeches, regardless of how late they start, can stretch on for upward of an hour.

Even in Erie, however, rallygoers standing behind Trump could be seen leaving the event early.

J.D. Vance is now offering a religious justification for the bigoted immigration policies touted by Donald Trump and himself.

Vance on Saturday appeared at Christian nationalist preacher Lance Wallnau’s election-season revival tour in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, hoping to appeal to the right-wing Christian population, which has always been a key part of the Republican base.

While sitting for an interview with Pastor Jason Howard, the leader of the nearby Sanctuary church, Vance defended his campaign’s immigration policies while answering questions about faith, invoking a “Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family.”

“It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as an American leader is to the people of your own country,” said Vance.

Vance said supporters of himself and Trump “should not let Kamala Harris claim the high ground on compassion,” saying President Biden and her immigration policies are “a disgrace.” Vance said he and Trump’s immigration plan will “maximize compassion,” despite the fact that it calls for mass deportations.

Vance’s comments seem to be defending his previous racist rhetoric against Haitian immigrants, particularly repeating a disproven story that they are capturing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The result has been violent threats against schools, hospitals, and government buildings in the town, for which Vance and Trump refuse to take responsibility, even after some Haitian immigrants filed charges against them. Some Republicans have echoed Trump’s comments with their own racist statements.

Trump has pushed more racist rhetoric against other towns that have welcomed immigrants from Haiti, including Charleroi, Pennsylvania, drawing a backlash from town officials. One would hope that the Democrats would speak out against the racism and regressive immigration policies, but their response has been lacking.