Texas at heart of vote war
State is defending against many suits over restrictions
WASHINGTON — Fewer and fewer states are standing with Texas as it continues to resist calls to expand mail-in voting amid the coronavirus outbreak, with South Carolina on Wednesday becoming the latest to allow anyone to cast a ballot by mail this fall.
Texas is now one of just five states won’t accept concerns about the coronavirus as an excuse to vote by mail and state leaders have blocked attempts by local officials in Harris County to make voting by mail more accessible.
That Texas is out on the edge on an issue of voting access should come as no surprise, experts in voting laws say.
The Republicans who run state government have made Texas a national leader in voting restrictions, ground zero in a series of long-running fights over voting rights, and hotly debated allegations of potential
voter fraud. It’s a battle President Donald Trump has escalated in the past week, tweeting repeatedly about mail-in voting, which he alleges will lead to “MAYHEM!!!” despite no evidence of such in the states that already have widespread voting by mail.
Democrats have poured millions into at least 18 different legal battles against Texas over mail-in voting and a host of other election issues — more than anywhere in the nation — as the state’s elections have grown more competitive. They charge that the Republicans who run state government have placed hurdles at every step of the electoral process to keep their power despite demographic changes that have diminished their public support.
Texas’ sluggish voter turnout rates are frequently cited as evidence that GOP suppression efforts are working. The state’s decision not to make it easier to vote by mail, critics say, is just the latest example.
“Republicans have erected barrier after barrier to delay what is inevitable, which is Texas turning from a ruby red state to a purple state before our very eyes,” said U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm, which is involved in five lawsuits over Texas election laws. “Texas Republicans are some of the best in the country at voter suppression. They are leading the way on voter suppression.”
Though there has been little study of the cumulative impact of the voting restrictions, there is some evidence that one of the state’s most contested laws — requiring voters to show photo identification to vote — has discouraged participation at the polls. A University of Houston study found that more than 16 percent of non-voters in Harris County and nearly 15 percent of non-voters in a massive West Texas swing district didn’t participate in the 2016 election at least in part because they lacked an approved ID.
The hunt for fraud
Republicans in the state say they’re fighting to maintain confidence in the electoral system during one of the most chaotic elections in memory. They insist that they’re defending against rampant voter fraud, pointing to high profile instances and anecdotes, but offering no hard evidence of widespread problems.
In 2019, the state arrested a South Texas mayor and his wife, accusing them of asking voters to change their addresses to places they didn’t live, including an apartment complex the mayor owned. Eighteen other people were also charged in that case.
The state prosecuted just three other individuals for voter fraud in 2019, according to records provided by the Attorney General’s Office. The state prosecuted about 130 people from 2005 through 2018, most of them minor cases that ended with the defendants sent to diversion programs.
Republicans say fraud is much more prevalent than those prosecutions suggest.
“Voter suppression is when you get out there in front of the polls with guns and sticks and tell people, ‘If you don’t vote for X candidate or Y candidate, you better not come here,’” said Quico Canseco, a former Republican congressman who now leads the Elections Integrity Project at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “When you’re creating laws that make sure there’s security in the ballot, that’s not voter suppression. That’s voice protection.”
When voters have run afoul of the state’s complicated election code — even unknowingly — Texas officials have come down hard.
In one of the most highprofile cases, Crystal Mason was arrested after casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. Mason was on supervised federal release after serving a fiveyear jail sentence, but Texas officials said she violated a state law that prohibits felons from voting before completing their sentences.
Mason says she didn’t know she was doing anything wrong because she had completed her jail sentence. She was given a voter registration card after and was never told that she couldn’t vote because she was still under federal supervision.
“Where are we supposed to get it from?” Mason said. “I’m supposed to pick up the law book and read every law?”
Though her ballot was never counted, she faces another five-year prison sentence for voter fraud.
Mason says she believes she’s being made an example of to discourage others from voting. She hopes her case does the opposite.
“I would hope that people look at the outcome of everything and see that it is very important to vote,” she said. “All of these are elected officials — and that’s from the DA, the judges, the constables — everybody, they’re elected.”
Barriers at every stage
Would-be voters in Texas quickly learn that the anti-fraud measures — or barriers, depending on how you look at them — start with getting on the voter rolls.
“Texas imposes barriers to registration and voting in ways that numerous states do not do,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. The group is one of many across the nation suing over Texas voting laws.
“Those barriers exist at basically every stage of the voting pipeline and they compound — the result is that it is unnecessarily hard for too many eligible Texans to participate and vote,” Pérez said.
Texas is one of just nine states that refuse to offer online voter registration. As of August, voters in 40 states could register online. Another state, Oklahoma, is phasing it in, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
On top of that, Texas is one of only 10 states that require voters to register 30 days in advance.
And while at least 20 states have started automatically registering voters as they apply for, renew or update drivers licenses, Texas Department of Public Safety still requires Texans going through that process to print and mail a voter registration form to their county registrar — rules a San Antonio district judge last month decided are a violation of the National Voter Registration Act, ordering the state to change them, a victory for Democrats.
The Texas Civil Rights Project reported hearing from 106 voters in Harris County who had their provisional ballots rejected in 2018 because they mistakenly thought they had registered with DPS online.
The state, meanwhile, also has requirements in place for third-party groups such as the League of Women Voters that are trying to help people register that other states do not. That includes mandating that volunteers get approval from each of the state’s 254 counties where they intend to register voters.
Closing polling places
Texas has led the nation in shuttering polling places, closing 750 since 2012, according to a report published last year. Many of those were closed as part of a statewide effort to shift to centralized voting centers, a move supported by Democrats who say they intended to make voting easier and more convenient.
Then last year the Legislature passed a new law prohibiting temporary polling locations, often used by Texas counties during early voting, especially on or near college campuses.
Democrats have sued to stop that law, saying it’s an attempt to “steal an election from the rising Texas electorate.”
State Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, who pushed the legislation said at the time that it was necessary to prevent “selective vote harvesting” and accused “some subdivisions of the state” of “targeting desirable voting populations at the exclusion of others.”
But perhaps the most contentious law in place is the state’s voter ID law, which voting rights advocates have fought for nearly a decade. The current law has been watered down some as courts have said past iterations were discriminatory.
Voters are now required to show one of seven acceptable forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. If they don’t have one of them, they can still vote, but have to sign an affidavit and show a utility bill or paycheck with their name and address.
The UH study found that Latino non-voters specifically were significantly less likely than Anglo non-voters to understand the ID rule, and significantly more likely to believe it was more restrictive than it actually is.
Sending a message
It’s unclear how much fraud that law has stopped, meanwhile, as studies have shown voter impersonation is exceedingly rare. In the decade before the state first passed its voter ID law in 2011, there were only two cases of in-person voter impersonation prosecuted to a conviction — a period of time in which 20 million votes were cast, a district judge noted in a 2014 opinion overturning the law.
Republicans insist fraud is happening. Canseco at the TPPF said he’s heard anecdotes about noncitizens being approached by volunteers trying to register them to vote.
In 2017, Rosa Ortega, a green card holder who had lived in the Dallas area since she was a teenager, was sentenced to eight years in prison for voting illegally. Ortega, who is on parole after serving nine months and now faces deportation, has said she didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to vote, but Republicans have pointed to her case as an example of what they’re trying to stop.
Canseco said he knows dead people are still on the rolls, as well.
Pressed for hard evidence of rampant fraud, he said it’s hard to come by because “nobody has really gone out and documented this stuff” and because prosecutions are difficult.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office is responsible for investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases, said the same earlier this month.
“It’s limited to what we can do,” Paxton said during a Zoom interview with the Texas Public Policy Foundation last week. “But we try to send the message with what we do — and the fact that we’re investigating well over 100 cases right now — that we take this seriously, and we’re going to do our best.
“You may be the unfortunate one we catch.”
Taylor Goldenstein contributed reporting from
Austin.