(The Center Square) – High tide peak storm surges from Hurricane Erin are forecast from 1 to 3 feet between South Carolina and Virginia, and 2 to 4 feet on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Erin at 8 a.m. Wednesday was Category 2 at 100 mph maximum sustained winds and moving 13 mph to the north-northwest, having started to make the turn away from the mainland as expected. The National Hurricane Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the storm’s center was 645 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, and 900 miles west-southwest of Bermuda.

Veteran meteorologists have marveled at the size of the storm.

Hurricane force winds (74 mph or greater) extend outward 90 miles from the center, and tropical storm force winds (39 mph or greater) extend 265 miles from the center. Rain for the Carolina coast is just 1 to 2 inches Wednesday and into Thursday, with damage coming more from storm surge than rain or wind.

The next high tides on the Outer Banks are 6:18 p.m. Wednesday, and Thursday at 6:45 a.m. and 7:10 p.m. Erin has already sent Atlantic Ocean water over dunes and N.C. 12, the famed 148-mile roadway linking peninsulas and islands of the Outer Banks.

Mandatory evacuations have been issued for Ocracoke Island in Hyde County and Hatteras Island in Dare County. Each county has declared an emergency.

Storm surge warnings were in effect from Cape Lookout to Duck; a tropical storm warning was in effect from Beaufort Inlet to the Virginia border inclusive of the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds; and a tropical storm watch was in effect from the North Carolina-Virginia border to Chincoteague, Va.

The Wednesday evening high tide for coastal South Carolina, including Charleston, and southern North Carolina is being closely watched for flooding. Early Thursday evening is the expected time of coastal flooding from the southern Delmarva Peninsula and southern Chesapeake Bay down to eastern North Carolina.

The storm’s projected path through the weekend skirts parallel to moving more away from the Atlantic Seaboard. Thursday’s pass is by the Carolinas and Virginia, and Friday the storm will be moving by Maine.

Coastal rescues from rip currents in North Carolina, according to published reports, have numbered between 75 and 100 over Monday and Tuesday.

As often happens with hurricanes, water began to run over N.C. 12 on Tuesday. The highway begins at U.S. 70 at the community of Sea Level and runs to a point just north of Corolla and south of the Currituck Banks North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve. Two ferries, Hatteras Island to Ocracoke Island and Cedar Island to Ocracoke Island, are part of the route.

The storm’s landfall miss of the state is particularly welcome in light of Hurricane Helene. Recovery from that storm is in its 47th week. Helene killed 107 in the state, 236 across seven states in the South, and caused an estimated $60 billion in damage to North Carolina.

(The Center Square) – While most Democrats are opposed, President Donald Trump’s vow to end mail-in voting, which he says is ripe for fraud, has been met with approval from both an election attorney as well as the America First Policy Institute.

“President Trump should be applauded for leading the charge to ensure that every American’s vote matters and is not undermined by corruption,” the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) told The Center Square by email.

“This is not just a policy fight,” AFPI said. “This is a fight for the survival of our republic.”

AFPI is a non-profit and non-partisan research institute aiming to “advance policies that put the American people first,” according to its website.

Election attorney and founder of law firm OGC Law, LLC Greg Teufel told The Center Square that “eliminating mail-in balloting would go a long way toward restoring confidence in our election procedures.”

“Mail-in voting has long been recognized as the most vulnerable type of voting for election fraud,” Teufel said.

“Because ballots are not completed in front of election officials, coercion, bribery, and voting on behalf of people of limited competence is all possible,” Teufel told The Center Square.

AFPI likewise told The Center Square that “President Trump is right in saying that our elections will never be secure so long as we have widespread use of mail-in ballots.”

“With rare exception, mass mail-in voting is a recipe for fraud and chaos,” AFPI said. “Other nations recognize this, and many abandoned this broken system decades ago.”

“The United States of America is the greatest nation in the world, and our electoral system should set the global standard for security and transparency,” AFPI said.

AFPI listed to The Center Square examples of the issues of mail-in voting.

For instance, “in some states, one now can apply to be on the voter rolls as a ‘permanent absentee voter,’ which means one automatically gets an absentee ballot application every election,” AFPI said.

Additionally, “reliance solely on mail-in voting may lead to the disenfranchisement of America’s eligible citizen class and could also lead to fraud through ballot trafficking,” AFPI told The Center Square.

“Mass mail-in voting presents vulnerabilities with the chain of custody of a ballot and increases the prevalence of error in states that do not maintain clean voter rolls,” AFPI said.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Trump posted on his Truth Social account Monday: “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” Trump said.

The president further said that “while we’re at it,” he will get rid of “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Trump said the efforts to protect elections will be brought about by an executive order “to help bring honesty to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

(The Center Square) – Oklahoma will begin requiring teachers who move to the state from California or New York to pass certification exams proving their values align with Oklahoma’s.

The test reportedly contains 50 questions on American citizenship, religion, gender and makeup of the U.S. government.

Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction, said teaching standards in New York and California are “antithetical” to Oklahoma’s standards. He said an example of this is California requiring teachers to assert there are no biological differences between sexes.

“We want to make sure, as we are recruiting the best and the brightest in the country, that they align with our values,” Walters said.

Walters said the state is working with the nonprofit organization Prager University, which produces educational materials, to conduct the exam. Ten other states, including Florida, Idaho and South Carolina, use educational materials provided by PragerU.

Some of the questions on the exam reportedly include:

What are the first three words of the Constitution?

Why is freedom of religion important to American identity?

What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

How many U.S. Senators are there?

Why do some states have more Representatives than others?

Randi Weingarten, president of the union American Federation of Teachers, criticized Walters’ decision in a statement.

“His priority should be educating students,” Weingarten said of Walters. “But instead, it’s getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him.”

Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, agreed. She told USA Today the decision by the Oklahoma Department of Education was made as a “political stunt.”