Voter ID problems delayed hundreds at polls, report says

Advocacy group details barriers at election sites during 2016 race

AUSTIN — Hundreds were delayed from voting and others nearly turned away entirely during the presidential election because of confusion over the status Texas voter ID laws, a new report from a voting rights advocacy group shows.

It’s just one of numerous problems Texas voters — particularly minority groups — faced during the 2016 election cycle, the report from the Texas Civil Rights Project detailed Thursday.

“Unfortunately, throughout the state, voters faced numerous obstacles that complicated the process,” said Beth Stevens, voting rights director at Texas Civil Rights Project. “Through our Election Protection Coalition, we heard directly from thousands of voters about the barriers they faced in our electoral system.”

The first of its kind Texas-based report on voter

issues was limited in scope to just over 4,000 incidents that were logged. But Stevens said it’s safe to assume many more Texans experienced similar obstacles who simply did not know who to turn to.

“Common sense says that there is whole subset of voters that didn’t know who to call and just walked away,” she said.

Polling site problems

Of the 4,000 incidents that were tracked by a coalition of voting advocacy groups during the presidential election, most were issues related to polling place problems, voter registration status or voter ID requirements. More specifically:

Hundreds of callers reported that they were not on the voter rolls because of slight discrepancies in their names or addresses.

123 people during early voting and 186 on Election Day called to report confusion about voter identification requirements, often prompted by misleading information at polling locations or inaccurate information from poll workers.

• About 57 percent of calls were related to polling location problems, most notably polling sites being changed or eliminated. Most of the reports came from predominately black areas of Houston, the report showed.

• And many voters reported wait times in excess of one hour noting that there were too few poll workers to process voters or that multiple machines were either inoperable or not being utilized.

The report comes nearly a year after a federal appeals court first ruled the state’s strict voter ID law passed in 2011 discriminated against minorities and the poor.

That law would have required all voters to present a government-issued ID. Before that law, voters needed only to bring a voter registration card.

Supporters of the tougher ID laws, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have said they are needed to prevent voter fraud.

“Voter fraud is real, and it undermines the integrity of the election process,” Abbott said last year after the courts struck down the state’s tougher ID laws.

But critics argued such requirements disenfranchise poor and minority voters, who face difficulties obtaining IDs. More than 600,000 Texas voters lack a suitable ID under the law.

Even though the court ordered voters who did not have one of the forms of ID must still be allowed to vote, many polling sites during early voting included signs that said voter ID was required with no reference to allowable exceptions.

“The inaccurate signage and misinformation combined with apparent failures in poll worker training resulted in at least several cases where voters were almost wrongly turned away,” the TCRP’s report showed.

Larger effort planned

The group cited one incident in Harris County as an example, but did not provide the name of the person involved. According to the group, the man did not have a photo ID but presented his voter registration card and a utility bill. He was initially turned away, but election protection volunteers stationed at the polling place were there to make sure the man was allowed to vote by signing a “reasonable impediment declaration.”

Not every voter who came in contact with the Texas Election Protection Coalition gave their race, but of the 3,100 that did, more than 70 percent said they were Latino or Hispanic or black or AfricanAmerican.

That coalition is led by the TCRP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund and Texas Common Cause.

While the TCRP’s actions were focused largely on Harris and Dallas counties in 2016, next year the groups are planning a larger effort with more trained volunteers to cover a larger portion of the state.

Texas routinely ranks at the bottom of voter turnout nationally and critics have long blamed the state’s laws for keeping 4 million potential voters from participating in elections.