When voting becomes its own disaster

October 02, 2020

My World’s on Fire is a free newsletter about disasters from journalist Colleen Hagerty. My goal is to help you feel a bit more at ease about our unpredictable world by equipping you with in-depth reporting and insights. I can only do that with your continued support, so please subscribe and share!

The trees are changing color, the days are getting shorter, and social media is even more insufferable than usual.

So yes, Election Day is near.

Hopefully, you already have a plan in place for how you’ll cast your ballot – here’s a good place to start, if not – and maybe a backup plan, too. Because, like pretty much everything else this year, voting is promising to be more complicated than usual. And that’s particularly true for the currently-growing number of people who have been evacuated or lost their homes due to disasters, from the wildfires in the West to the hurricanes along the coasts.

In a recent report, the Center for Public Integrity and Stateline detailed how historic floods in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana impacted voting in the 2016 election:

“Twenty-six percent of Black voters in East Baton Rouge Parish had their polling place changed between the 2012 and 2016 general elections, compared with 15% of white voters in the parish, according to a new analysis of polling place movement by the Center for Public Integrity and Stateline. The changes to East Baton Rouge Parish’s polling places in the wake of the 2016 floods added confusion for voters already preoccupied with reconstructing their lives in the wake of the disaster. Many advocates say recovery was slower in the parish’s majority-Black neighborhoods, where residents already struggled with systemic inequities before the storm.”

As the article notes, similar concerns are certainly warranted this year, so if you live in an area that has been recently hit by a natural hazard, be sure to check on any changes to the process in your area. Your local news station is a good place to start, as is your municipal or state website. I’ll be sharing some resources I’ve found on Twitter, and I highly suggest sharing anything you learn on social media to keep your local network informed, too.

I’ll be reporting more on the intersection of the election and disasters in weeks to come, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions on this topic.

More on my radar

As always…

thank you for being a part of this community. If you found today’s dispatch interesting, please consider sharing it and spreading the word on social media.

Here’s a little something for reading to the end.

Colleen