Your guide to a disaster-prone election year
Hello and welcome to week three of State of Emergency, a limited-run newsletter about how disasters are reshaping our politics. I’m Jake Bittle.
Hurricane Michael tore across the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm less than four weeks before the pivotal 2018 midterm elections, killing dozens of people and destroying more than 1,000 structures. In the weeks that followed the storm, then-governor Rick Scott issued an executive order that loosened restrictions around mail-in balloting and allowed local governments to open fewer Election Day polling places.
“We do not find evidence that the amount of rainfall from the hurricane drove turnout declines. We do find that polling place closures and increased travel distances meaningfully depressed turnout.”
— Kevin Morris and Peter Miller, authors of “Authority after the Tempest: Hurricane Michael and the 2018 Elections”
A few years later, an academic …
