Ellen Gustafson in the Asheville Citizen-Times: What Buncombe County's Post-Helene Turnout Teaches Us
Three weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, Buncombe County held an election, and turnout went up. In a new op-ed for the Asheville Citizen-Times, Vet the Vote's Ellen Gustafson draws on our Come Hell or High Water event in Asheville, the third stop in a series that also visited Houston and Tampa Bay, to explain how that happened. The answer, she writes, comes down to people: election officials rebuilt their entire plan around the number of trained workers they could count on, and those workers showed up even as they were recovering from the storm themselves.
“I have not once heard an election official say the rules failed them or the equipment let them down. What they describe instead is people: how many workers could be trained in time, how many of them still had a house, and how many stood at a check-in table at 6 a.m. anyway.”
Ellen makes the case that veterans and military families are especially well suited to this work, and that boards across Western North Carolina are building their rosters now.
Read the full op-ed in the Asheville Citizen-Times (subscription required)