There is a hurricane in the Gulf – Hurricane Isaias – that will make land fall soon.
It got me thinking about how often elections are administered during major disasters (or on a timeline very close to recent disasters), so I put together disastersandelections.readyfortuesday.com. It’s a database that pulls disaster declarations from FEMA and election information from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab (Senate and President results) over the last 50 years.
It only looks at major disasters, as defined and labeled by FEMA, so there are certainly more things like this (“smaller” natural disasters, fires, etc.) that election administrators have worked through. This is the floor, not the ceiling.
A few things that stood out:
Since 1976, there have been 282 disaster declarations for which the incident period (FEMA term) touched between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30 of an election year
Of those, 40 were active on Election Day.
Florida has had more of these declarations than any state, 21 in all, and has had at least one in each of the last five election windows.
Lastly, I’m thinking of friends and colleagues in the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf regions of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
One thing is for sure: No matter what happens, the election administration communities in those states will come together to make sure the election happens.