This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
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As climate change accelerates, extreme weather events are affecting whether and how people vote. Intentional forms of voter suppression now interact with the reality that youth, people of color, elders, immunocompromised, and disabled people who already deal with barriers to casting their ballot may face health risks when voting in person.
Scientists say this summer was the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. August marked the 15th straight month that set a new high temperature, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and July 22 was the warmest day in recent history, stated the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Though 2023 was the warmest year registered globally since tracking began in the mid-1800s, experts say 2024 could surpass it.
“NASA and NOAA’s global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year: We are facing a climate crisis,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in January. “From extreme heat to wildfires to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing.”
At a Harris-Walz campaign rally this summer, Minnesota governor Tim Walz paused his remarks so that medics could aid an attendee who seemed to have grown faint from the heat. Mother Jones’ Julia Métraux spoke with medical experts who said that "organizers of large outdoor political events across the political aisle have an ethical obligation to keep attendees as safe as possible to reduce potential complications such as heatstroke.” The Washington Post found that dozens of people were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses at Trump rallies from June through August.
Excessive heat waves in Sun Belt states and additional extreme weather events will persist in our new future. Yet according to an investigation from Documented and ProPublica, training videos for Project 2025, a playbook for a right-wing presidential administration compiled by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, advise future appointees to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
On the final primary election days in Phoenix, thousands of people cast their ballots in triple-digit temperatures. According to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, Arizona passed more restrictive voting laws than any other state in the decade after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder made it easier for states with a history of voter discrimination to enact restrictive voter laws. When extreme weather and restrictive voting laws combine, “that doesn’t mean the climate crisis is making it harder for you to vote,” Environmental Voter Project (EVP) executive director Nathaniel Stinnett, whose Boston-based organization focuses on getting folks who care about the environment to vote consistently, told Teen Vogue. “It means that other forms of voter suppression are even more dangerous and even more effective,” he said.
Prism’s Ray Levy Uyeda also emphasized that “extreme weather itself is not an intentional form of voter suppression.” But “experts warn that the combination of state legislatures that have proven themselves hostile to climate change legislation and subpar gubernatorial extreme weather response plans create a scenario in which the electorate’s voice isn’t being heard,” Levy Uyeda wrote. Heat is the deadliest type of weather in the US. “The fact that extreme heat driven by human-caused climate change is creating a slow-moving public health disaster across wide swaths of the United States should, in theory, spur immediate, bipartisan action,” wrote Grist’s Zoya Teirstein.
Sunrise Movement hubs have for months been protesting the lethal conditions, calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency. Additionally, youth-led organizations, including Sunrise and Fridays for Future USA, have joined a coalition of environmental, labor, and health groups in telling the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deem extreme heat and wildfire smoke major disasters. “That’s another way that we could try to protect our democracy and our elections because right now it’s even hard for when a natural disaster like a hurricane happens during an election,” Sunrise communications manager Denae Ávila-Dickson told Teen Vogue. “We don’t really have a good process for how to make that fair, for people to still get a chance to have their voices heard, to still go to the ballot box.”
Election emergencies are handled on a state-by-state basis. While most states have laws related to crises that happen during election cycles, what these statutes cover and what voting changes are allowed varies widely across the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For example, about a month before the 2022 midterms, Hurricane Ian made landfall in central Florida and the Carolinas. Voting rights groups asked Florida governor Ron DeSantis to extend the statewide voting registration deadline and add more early voting days during that election cycle, along with other requests. He issued accommodations in only Republican-leaning counties, the Guardian reported.
As early voting for the 2024 election gets underway in some states, communities across the Southeastern United States are literally underwater, grappling with the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
"I think we need to push for policies that are going to specifically ensure people have the right to vote during natural disasters [that] have been fueled by the climate crisis," Ávila-Dickson said.
“The same states that are at the front lines of the climate crisis are also the states that have some of the most restrictive voting laws,” said Ávila-Dickson, who is from Texas. Voters in college face a shortage of campus polling locations in the state, where student IDs are not legally accepted as a form of identification, and same-day, online, and automatic voter registration is prohibited. Bills that aim to limit youth access to the polls were pushed through by multiple state legislatures in the lead-up to this year’s general election.
Republican state lawmakers have passed a raft of other legislation that will make it harder for folks to vote, particularly people of color, who have historically been subject to political disenfranchisement. This uptick in restrictive policies followed former president Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, a national voting-rights organization that works to boost the power of Black voters, noted that local laws and ballot measures moving through the South and Midwest in 2023 would “impede the rights and freedoms of Black people and other people of color.”
The NAACP’s Brooklyn branch recently won a lawsuit against a 100-year-old prohibition on passing out food or water to New Yorkers who are waiting to cast their ballots. Yet similar restrictions from 2021 on offering sustenance to voters outside polling places are still on the books in Florida and Georgia, despite lawsuits filed by voting-rights advocates. (The TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm built the final season around a storyline involving the Georgia law.) “The voter education aspect of it is making sure that young voters know that being forced to stand in long lines without water during extreme heat is something that is 100% intended. It's not something that's just a coincidence,” Ávila-Dickson said.
EVP's Stinnett said voter suppression campaigns can make people so overwhelmed by the idea of voting that they don’t bother trying. A 2022 EVP survey done in four battleground states shows that more than a quarter of registered voters and 37% of Black voters in Georgia alone see their state’s laws as complicated. One potential way to reduce uncertainty: Go to the polls with friends. “Make voting a social outing,” Stinnett said.
Advocates agree that extreme heat can pose challenges for on-the-ground voter education efforts as well. “Extreme weather doesn't just impact how people vote, it also impacts how they campaign,” Stinnett said. EVP volunteers have canvassed in Tucson throughout 2024, targeting “almost 230,000 potential first-time climate voters,” Stinnett noted. However, the door-to-door campaign temporarily shut down in July because it was consistently too hot, he explained. “Every time we scheduled something, we ended up having to cancel it, and eventually we just threw up our hands,” Stinnett said. A Sunrise door-knocking team for Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO) likewise endured fatigue from the heat, according to Ávila-Dickson.
Even those who avoid in-person election activities are impacted by our increasingly extreme weather, as a recent X post from the Pennsylvania Department of State made clear. “Due to the humidity much of PA is currently experiencing,” the department said in the October 1 post, “some voters are finding that their mail-in ballots have the return envelope already sealed.” Affected voters were asked to contact the department for next steps.
Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, created in 2019 during a series of international strikes that demanded action to address climate change, is an organization of young people striving for climate justice. Policy director Emilia Kim, 17, told Teen Vogue that voter accessibility and the climate crisis are “compound issues.” The coalition is equipping student teams in cities across the state to host voter registration drives at their schools. “Being Gen Z, we see a lot of climate despair,” Kim said. “Despair isn’t necessarily an option anymore. We need to transform those feelings that we have into action. The biggest thing for us this upcoming election season is getting people out to vote.”
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