Prepare to vote
Texans can still cast ballots even if they don’t have one of 7 approved forms of ID.
Texas Secretary of State Carlos H. Cascos is on a worthy mission these days. He’s traveling the state urging his fellow Texans to get up off their duffs this fall and vote. It’s a gargantuan task, in light of the fact that Texans have an abysmal record when it comes to turnout, usually among the worst in the country.
Texas also has an absymal record of DISCOURAGING voter turnout, as the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged just a couple of weeks ago when it ruled that the state’s voter ID law, approved in 2011, “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. . . .”
A part of Cascos’ message as he travels the state is that Texans can still vote even if they don’t have one of the seven approved forms of voter ID. If they’re in possession of some kind of document with their name and address on it, they still can vote, as long as they sign a declaration stating they have a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining one of the approved types of voter identification.
We applaud the secretary’s effort and would suggest that he also pay a call on a few of the state’s chief discouragers, including Attorney General Ken Paxton and Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. The two Republicans, and others, are continuing to do their best to keep Texans who don’t have voter IDs — more than 600,000 in all — out of the voting booth. They want voters to know they’ll be watching.
“If you sign that affidavit and you lie about not being able to get a photo ID, you can be prosecuted for perjury,” Paxton said on Fox News last month.
Stanart has said his office would investigate every voter who signs an affidavit and that “if I suspect someone has fraudulently signed a form saying they don’t have that ID, then I think that’s an issue.”
“This is part and parcel of an ongoing state effort to discourage and prevent certain citizens from voting,” Houston attorney Chad Dunn told the New York Times. “The state lost the litigation, and I’m afraid that what it’s trying to do now is salvage its efforts to the extent it can by scaring some people away from voting.”
In a motion filed last week in a Corpus Christi federal district court, Dunn and lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department argued that the state’s court-required education campaign about voting procedures was misleading voters into believing that casting a ballot was more difficult than it is. Cascos declined to comment.
Imagine if we had elected officials who said, “We want every Texan to exercise their constitutional right to vote, and if there are any barriers to your voting, we, as public servants, are eager to help you.”
What we have, instead, are officials who play on the old, discredited shibboleth that voter fraud is rampant and barriers to cheating must be erected. They ignore the fact that in-person voter fraud, the type of fraud voter IDs are designed to prevent, is practically nonexistent. One study among several found just two instances among 20 million votes cast during the past decade.
While such laws target a nonexistent problem, they do shift the electorate rightward, as Stanart and Paxton are well aware. ID laws disproportionately affect low-income voters, as well as people of color and students, all of whom tend to vote Democratic. Whether they’re Democrat, Republican or neither, we urge them to vote. They need to show cynical public officials that they are Americans, and they can’t be intimidated.
Early voting for the Nov. 8 election begins on Oct. 24 and ends Nov. 4. Texans can register to vote by filling out an application and mailing it at least 30 days before the election date. Applications are available on the Secretary of State’s website, www.sos.texas.gov.