With the scale of deadly devastation from Hurricane Helene now coming into focus, the easy path here would be to center attention on the infuriating circus that Donald Trump tried to bring Monday to Georgia with his typical toxic brew of lies, distortions and self-aggrandizement.

But we're five weeks away from the general election. And our attention is much better spent on the professional election administrators who are still very much hard at work, despite the former president's nearly decade-long attempts to vilify them (with zero actual evidence).

Consider Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, and Paul Cox, the board's general counsel. They told journalists in a conference call Tuesday that they're still trying to reach local election officials and poll workers in some of their state's 100 counties, especially in the mountainous western region, which took the brunt of Helene's hardest hits.

"This storm is like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina," Brinson Bell said. "The destruction is unprecedented, and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting."

And yet, I have to say, she sounded undaunted by the tasks ahead.

Ten county election offices are closed due to the storm and must be made operational again. Absentee voting is already underway, and North Carolina had more than 256,000 requests for ballots as of Tuesday. The deadline to register to vote in North Carolina is Oct. 11.

In-person early voting starts Oct. 17.

Brinson Bell was asked if she is worried voters will lose faith in election results as her team was scrambling to do their jobs while cellphone service is spotty, electricity and clean water are at least days away in places, and roads have been washed away. She cited voting that happened in tents in a coastal county........

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