Trump proxies like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped fuel a deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, including a barrage of claims that FEMA is confiscating community-donated supplies. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government aimed the hurricane at Republican counties in order to swing the presidential election.

The online conspiracies have real-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal aid efforts are drowning out real information people in western North Carolina and other ravaged states need in order to begin the recovery process, and false claims about government malfeasance are galvanizing far-right militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are racing to figure out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling locations are shut down, and the U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver mail-in ballots to multiple ZIP codes because of washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top election officials, said last week.

On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to loosen voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early-voting processes, establish more voting sites, and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.  “Early voting may look different in some of the 13 hardest-hit counties, but it will go on,” Brinson Bell told reporters.