Virus hampers voter registration efforts.
WASHINGTON — Texas was making record gains getting voters on the rolls. Now the coronavirus threatens to grind that progress to a halt, throwing up major hurdles to Democratic efforts to make the state’s November elections competitive for a change.
Texas' emergence as a battleground in 2020 depends largely on new voters, and both Democrats and Republicans have poured millions into efforts to register them — massive campaigns that have already added 2 million voters since the 2016 election.
But the coronavirus countermeasures — particularly limits on public gatherings — threaten to seriously hamper those efforts.
Because Texas is one of 11 states that do not allow voters to register online, much of the work depends on face-to-face interaction — going door to door and setting up booths on college campuses, at concerts, naturalization ceremonies, graduations and other big events that are prohibited in the time of COVID-19.
“Crises like this really expose the failures in our system — the fact that we don’t have online voter registration, the fact that we are a state currently that doesn’t allow vote by mail,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who launched Jolt, a group focused on mobilizing Texas voters, where she is now a consultant.
The virus hit as Texas topped 16 million registered voters for the first time. The state had been adding voters faster than its population grows heading into the 2020 presidential election. Now it has everyone rethinking the outreach campaigns that were underway.
Engage Texas, a Republican super PAC with nearly $10 million on hand, says it’s redirecting field staff to start calling people. As of January, the group said it had registered 100,000 conservative voters. Now it’s focusing mostly on calling people whose voter registrations have lapsed or who may not know they aren’t already registered.
“They’re making good contact by phone, and obviously since people are at home perhaps more often now than they were in the past, it makes sense that telephone contact is more successful this week or these days than it has been in the past,” said Ray Sullivan, a spokesman for the group.
The Texas Democratic Party, meanwhile, says it is reworking everything, launching a fully digital organizing project that will include a new Nextdoor.com-style website where people can post about everything from politics to what’s happening in their communities during the pandemic. They say they’re doing aggressive outreach to get people on it. And the party says it is starting weekly calls with groups in all 254 Texas counties.
“Obviously the challenges are not insignificant,” said Cliff Walker, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “But it helped us reorient and take our organization program that was going to be focused on voter registration at the doors — and we had great plans to ramp up a lot of that type of face-to-face interaction — and to do something that’s different and could be a silver lining on a really big dark gray cloud.”
The party says its most effective registration efforts in 2018 were reaching out to people who were new to Texas — and that effort won’t change now.
But the virus makes other outreach efforts impossible.
“It’s a tragedy. It’s a democratic tragedy,” said Drew Galloway, executive director of Mobilize Organize Vote Empower, a group that registered 7,500 voters on college campuses in three weeks before the pre-primary deadline in February.
MOVE used to set up on 55 college campuses across Texas, where they would help students fill out registration forms and then mail the forms for them.
Now the group can do little more than send links to voter registration forms and pester students with follow-up texts and emails urging them to fill it out and mail it in.
Advocates see those as setbacks caused by broader problems with the state’s election system that the virus is exposing. Because Texas doesn’t yet allow everyone to vote by mail, Gov. Greg Abbott has already delayed at least one round of elections — something advocates say could be avoided if people could vote from their homes.
MOVE is part of the Texas Youth Power Alliance, a group that set a goal of registering 300,000 new voters in 2020. Jolt, which is also part of the alliance, claimed its organizers talked to some tens of thousands of potential voters in 2018, seeking to register voters on college campuses and at quinceañeras.
It is much harder to get students — many of whom are no longer in their dorms on campus — to print a form when many don’t even have printers, than it is to simply show up on campus and get their signatures, Galloway said.
“That is a 10-step process, versus what used to take two minutes to do,” he said. “If we did have online voter registration, they could go online, register to vote, change their address and do that in a couple of minutes.”
The outreach to college-age students matters especially in Texas, which is a very young state, he said. More than 40 percent of the population is under 30.
“There are going to be students — regardless of party — that are not going to be registered to vote and are not going to be able to vote in the upcoming election because of our current voter registration laws,” Galloway said.