The Explained today The podcast takes an in-depth look at the key issues of the 2024 election from the perspective of seven battleground states. We heard from voters Georgia, Pennsylvania, ArizonaAnd Wisconsin until now; This week we address North Carolinawhere a storm devastated the state — and some of its election infrastructure — last month.

Officials in North Carolina are preparing for an unprecedented election in the wake of Hurricane Helene. The storm has wreaked havoc on North Carolinians' voting infrastructure – washing away mail-in ballots, disrupting postal service and destroying polling places – and could impact what Election Day looks like in two weeks.

The state is expected to be close — former President Donald Trump won by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, and current polling averages suggest an even tighter race this year — and all eyes are on the mountains that the suffered the brunt of the hurricane's impact.

While some parts of life are returning to normal after Hurricane Helene last month — power is back, internet connectivity is restored — many people in the western part of the state still don't have potable water in their homes.

With so many people displaced or dealing with repairs, experts have raised concerns about low turnout.

“The question will be: If you don't have to swallow water when you shower, how important will voting be to you?” Steve Harrison, a political reporter at NPR affiliate station WFAE, said Explained today Host Sean Rameswaram.

In order to ensure that the elections proceed as normally as possible, local election officials were allowed to relocate polling stations and adjust opening hours. The state also updated rules for mail-in voters, allowing them to return their completed ballots in counties other than their home county as before, although the state has not reinstated a three-day grace period for ballots to be counted.

Despite the added flexibility, actually communicating the changes to voters in affected areas remains a challenge. “Information is hard to come by because the internet and cell phones are down and everything is changing day to day,” Buncombe County resident Kaitlyn Leaf said. “Sometimes hour after hour.” (Leaf is married to a Vox Media employee, sound engineer Patrick Boyd.)

So far, officials' efforts to create more flexibility for voters appear to be paying off: The state set a turnout record on the first day of early voting, which began Oct. 17 in all 100 counties, although it's unclear how many of those Votes were cast in the affected areas.

According to Harrison's analysis, these voters could have an outsized influence on the outcome of the national election. Of the 15 counties hardest hit by Helene, Biden won only two in 2020: Buncombe, home to the liberal city of Asheville, and Watauga, home to Appalachian State University. The rest? Trump won by a large margin.

Polling averages show the 2024 presidential election is a dead heat in North Carolina, meaning a decline in voter turnout in those counties could ultimately hurt the former president's chances.

“If it gets incredibly close, I don’t think we’ll hear the last of Helene,” Harrison said Explained today.

North Carolina isn't the only state that could face obstacles on Election Day, although the effects of Hurricane Helene make its situation unique. Exceptionally narrow margins and irregularities in vote-counting rules in other battleground states could cause full election results to extend beyond Nov. 5.

With polls showing several of the battleground states in a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, election officials are warning that they may need to count a larger portion of ballots before media organizations are able to make reliable forecasts , which would result in a similar multi-day process by 2020.

Many states are also making last-minute attempts to purge voter rolls and change election rules. But at least two states are likely to see delays because their election rules have remained the same.

In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, election officials are prohibited from processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. In other states with mail-in ballots, workers can prepare ballots for counting earlier – by verifying signatures and flattening ballots – to streamline vote counting on Election Day. The late start of poll workers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could lead to late elections this year, especially if the race loses only a few thousand votes.

Both state legislatures considered updating their rules after the 2020 election, but conspiracy theories and partisan gridlock ultimately killed bills that would have done so.

“It's really frustrating,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told CNN in September. “(The proposed legislation) does not benefit any candidate. It doesn't benefit either party. It only benefits the public to know the results sooner and our election officials who otherwise wouldn’t have to work day and night.”

As we saw in 2020, any delay between Election Day and the final results leaves ample room for conspiracy theories to spread — something Trump is likely to take full advantage of. In 2020, Trump posted about “surprising ballot dumps” in Milwaukee following a surge in Biden votes when the city reported all of its mail-in votes at the same time. (He still falsely claims he won Wisconsin in 2020.)

CNN political correspondent Sara Murray says voters should ignore the conspiracy theories if they wait longer for results in 2024. “Just because this takes a few days doesn't mean there's some kind of mass voter fraud going on,” she said Explained today. “That doesn’t mean machines swap votes. That doesn't mean people throw away ballots. It just means poll workers are still counting the votes.”