OUR PICKSHow Do You Vote Amid the Hurricane Damage? | Working to Preempt Fraud Claims Ahead of Election | Climate Change Made Deadly Hurricane Helene More Intense, and more

How Do You Vote Amid the Hurricane Damage? States Are Learning as They Go.  (Jennifer Shutt, Stateline)
Hurricane season has not only wreaked havoc on people’s lives throughout much of the country, but could also make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots in hard-hit regions.

Last-Minute Change in U.S. Swing State’s Election Rules Alarms Some  (AFP / VOA News)
With the U.S. presidential vote only weeks away, the Georgia State Election Board, led by a pro-Donald Trump majority, passed a controversial requirement in September that counties manually hand count their ballots, a move that has caused alarm in the closely watched swing state.
Georgia officials from both sides of the political aisle say the count is not only superfluous — machines already count the ballots — but also a potential tool to sow doubt by slowing the process and creating space for disinformation should discrepancies arise via error-prone human counting.

Study: Climate Change Made Deadly Hurricane Helene More Intense  (AFP / VOA News)
Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10% more intense due to climate change, according to a study published Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Hurricane Milton Shows How a Storm’s Category Doesn’t Tell the Full Story  (Alec Luhn, Wired)
Milton’s reclassification to a Category 3 storm suggests it is weakening, but the scale accounts only for wind speed and not hurricane size, storm surge heights, or rainfall—which are all catastrophically large.

Republicans, Democrats Work to Preempt Fraud Claims Ahead of Election  (Patsy Widakuswara, VOA News)
Officials from both major parties in six states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last month for panel discussions hosted by the nonpartisan group Keep our Republic. The group seeks to educate the American public about threats to the U.S. election system and build trust in the electoral system.
They’re working to avoid a repeat of November 2020 scenes in nearby Detroit and other American cities where supporters of then-President Donald Trump, riled up by his baseless accusations of election fraud, pressured officials to stop counting the votes.

Though Voter Fraud Is Rare, U.S. Election Offices Feature Safeguards to Catch It  (AP, VOA News)
Voter fraud does happen occasionally. When it does, we tend to hear a lot about it. It also gets caught and prosecuted.
The nation’s multilayered election processes provide many safeguards that keep voter fraud generally detectable and rare, according to current and former election administrators of both parties.
America’s elections are decentralized, with thousands of independent voting jurisdictions. That makes it virtually impossible to pull off a large-scale vote-rigging operation that could tip a presidential race — or almost any other race.

November Will Be Worse  (Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic)
Hurricane disinformation was just the start.