Some New Jersey voters may find their hurricane-damaged polling sites replaced by military trucks, with — in the words of the state’s lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno — “a well-situated national guardsman and a big sign saying, ‘Vote Here.’ ” Half of the polling sites in Nassau County on Long Island still lacked power on Friday. And New York City was planning to build temporary polling sites in tents in some of its worst-hit neighborhoods.
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is threatening to create Election Day chaos in some storm-racked sections of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — and some effects may also be felt in other states, including Pennsylvania, where some polling sites still lacked power on Friday morning.
Disrupted postal delivery will probably slow the return of absentee ballots. And with some polling sites likely to be moved, elections officials were bracing for a big influx of provisional paper ballots — which could delay the vote count in places.
Weary local elections officials vowed that the vote would go on. “Come hell or high water — we had both — we’re voting on Tuesday,” William T. Biamonte, the Democratic commissioner at the Nassau County Board of Elections, said in an interview.
Storm-related voting disruptions seem unlikely to change the outcome of the presidential election, since the biggest problem areas are in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, which are all expected to go for President Obama. But even when elections officials get the polling sites up and running, many voters may stay away as they grapple with lingering damage to their homes, power failures and gas shortages. With turnout projected to be down in all these states, Mr. Obama could see his share of the national popular vote reduced.
The storm may have already affected the early vote, which could be important, given that analysts estimate that more than a third of the votes this year will be cast before Election Day. Early voting was temporarily halted in some states. In Ohio, the crucial Democratic stronghold of Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, had more people vote early every day this year than in 2008 — until Monday, the day of the storm, when the daily tally began to lag from its levels of four years ago.
But the lingering aftermath of the storm could have a bigger — if not always easy to predict — effect on state and local races. In the Senate race in Connecticut, where Christopher S. Murphy, a Democratic congressman, is running against Linda E. McMahon, a Republican former professional wrestling executive, some Democrats worry that storm damage in Democratic strongholds like Bridgeport could depress the vote.
Several close House races are being waged in areas that saw significant storm damage. In Suffolk County, on the eastern end of Long Island, Representative Tim Bishop, a five-term Democrat, is facing a rematch with Randy Altschuler, a Republican businessman who nearly won the seat two years ago. And on Staten Island, which saw some of the worst storm damage in New York City, Representative Michael G. Grimm, a first-term Republican facing questions about his fund-raising practices, is trying to stave off a challenge from Mark Murphy, a Democrat.
Then there are all the other local races, from school board elections across New Jersey to the hard fought-race for control of the New York State Senate.
With thousands of lawyers from both campaigns fanning out across the country, storm-related issues could provide new fodder for court challenges. As Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a public interest organization, put it, “There will be an incentive for whichever candidate is losing in the affected states to look for litigating opportunities as a result of the disrupted election.”
State and county elections officials are working around the clock to make sure the voting goes as smoothly as possible next week, said Dennis Scott Kobitz, the president of the New Jersey Association of Election Officials. “I actually slept here last night,” Mr. Kobitz, the administrator of the board of elections in Union County, N.J., said in a phone interview from his office.
He said that around half of the county’s polling sites still lacked power on Friday afternoon, and that he was making preparations to get generators for all of them by Tuesday.
But the problems throughout the region were considerable. Some polling sites were flooded or damaged, or cut off by roads needing repair. Others were in schools that had been transformed to shelters for people displaced by the storm.
And some election boards were struggling to find power or get assurances from the utilities that power would be restored in time. With their servers down, they also found themselves unable to update their Web sites for the public.
A telephone hot line set up by the New York City Board of Elections to help people find their voting sites was out of service. “Our central phone bank (866 VOTE NYC) is not functioning properly and our Manhattan and Staten Island offices have been closed since Monday due to loss of power,” the board’s Web site said on Friday.
New York State extended the deadline for absentee ballots to be received and counted to 13 days after Election Day, from seven days, to allow for postal delays caused by the storm. But they must be postmarked no later than Monday, said John Conklin, a spokesman for the state’s Board of Elections, which has been trying to help local boards get power restored or, failing that, get generators, fuel and extension cords.
A little-noticed New York State law allows counties to seek permission for a second day of voting if they determine that voter turnout was less than 25 percent “as the direct consequence” of a disaster, but several election lawyers said that they did not believe it had ever been invoked and that it was unlikely to be used next week.
Suffolk County plans to relocate five of its 342 polling places, said Jesse Garcia, a board of elections employee, who said that cards would be sent to voters and that workers would be sent to the closed sites to direct voters to the new ones.
In Bridgeport, Mayor Bill Finch took Connecticut’s secretary of the state, Denise Merrill, through his storm-ravaged city on Friday, stopping at the Longfellow School, the only one of the city’s 24 polling places still closed, which he said had been under two feet of water. Residents who normally vote there will be redirected to a nearby school to vote. Ms. Merrill promised to help municipalities without power to find generators.
Ms. Weiser, the lawyer at the Brennan Center, noted that the center had worked all year to try to block or mitigate strict election laws passed in a number of Republican-led states that it believed would put up hurdles for voters, often with success. “The storm created new, non-manmade hurdles,” she lamented.
