Hurricane relief efforts continue in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and elsewhere, and the devastation from the storms has prompted new worries about how it may impact turnout on Election Day, Nov. 5.

Former New Jersey Lieutenant Gov. Kim Guadagno has been in the situation before. She oversaw the elections when Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012, leaving 38 people dead, close to 350,000 homeless and more than 2 million without power. State officials scrambled to pull off voting, creating one of the first playbooks for modern-day elections in the wake of a natural disaster.

“You have to remember, this is 2012,” Guadagno said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “Early voting was not necessarily the way it is now. It’s not that common. It was very controversial back in 2012.

“So, we opened up the polls. We had the clerks open longer. We had a really good working relationship with people and all of the parties involved in the presidential and local elections leading up to Sandy.”

The logistical challenges were immense.

“After Sandy, we had 3,000 polling districts just disappear,” she continued. “So, we had to try to put those together as quickly as possible. There were a lot of challenges. It wasn’t so much about trust as it is today, in terms of the legality of voting and too many people voting. It was about making sure people had access to the polls at the time,” she said.”

The storm, as it turned out, didn’t stifle voter turnout. In fact, it had the opposite effect.

“Everybody always asks what happened with the voting,” Guadagno said. “Did people stay home because they were in shelters? I think people went out deliberately, because they were in shelters. The only thing they could control at that time was their ability to exercise their right to vote.

“They couldn’t control the weather. They couldn’t control the electricity. They couldn’t control where there were tides, but they could control who is going to be the next president of the United States. And that’s why I think we had a record number of votes. We had polling places completely slammed with people trying to get in there and strike a ballot.”