Mid-term Congressional Elections, 6 November 2018

Hurricane Michael, Florida (and others) 10 October 2018  

On 10 October 2018, Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall in Florid before entering Georgia as a strong Category 2 hurricane that evening. Michael later weakened to a tropical storm over central Georgia and crossed over to the Carolinas and Virginia on 11 October before re-entering the Atlantic Ocean. The extreme winds, storm surge and heavy rain resulted in widespread destruction, injuries and fatalities in the states of Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, and caused approximately USD $25 billion worth of damages (FEMA 2020).  

On 10 October Governor Rick Scott of Florida requested an expedited major disaster declaration and a declaration for Individual Assistance and Public Assistance for 14 counties, as well as Hazard Mitigation state-wide (Office of the Governor 2018a). President Trump declared a major disaster in Florida the following day. 322 counties across five Southern states—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas—had emergency declarations in effect, with warnings and watches, for hurricanes, tropical storms, storm surge, or a combination of these (FEMA 2018; Fausset et al. 2018).  

The hurricane wreaked destruction across Florida, with loss of power to more than 400,000 homes and businesses, disruption in telecommunications, damage to roads and highways, and the evacuation of families from their homes (Office of the Governor 2018b).  

Impact on the electoral process   

Hurricane Michael struck 27 days before the national Midterm elections. Would-be polling stations were destroyed, reducing the number of available polling sites from 125 to 61 in the affected counties. Potential mail-in voters were displaced from the addresses in which they were first registered (Morris and Miller 2023). County Supervisors of Elections in affected counties reported to Florida’s Secretary of State that they continued to experience telecommunications and other utilities disruptions, and/or that they anticipated shortages in trained poll workers.   

Every election supervisor has a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) for disaster contingencies, updated for every election. In Duval county, readiness for power loss or worse damage to polling stations had been previously put to the test when special election sites were set up county-wide after Hurricane Michael (Piggott 2022).  

On 18 October, Governor Scott issued an Executive Order to mitigate the electoral effects of Hurricane Michael. This included additional early voting sites for affected counties (as designated by the Supervisors of Elections), vesting the latter with the authority to accept a written or telephonic request for a vote-by-mail ballot, to relocate polling stations, and to consolidate them with early voting sites as necessary (Office of the Governor 2018b). However, this Executive Order did not provide any emergency funding to match these contingencies (Morris and Miller 2023).  

For the 2018 Midterm elections, Florida saw a voter turnout of 63 per cent, as compared with 75 per cent in 2016 and 51 per cent in 2014 (Florida Division of Elections 2020).