San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Abbott hits a new low with his voter-suppression order
There’s an old school of thought that if you’re an elected official and both ends of the political spectrum are grumbling about you, you must be doing something right.
The idea is that a leader who fails to fully satisfy any single faction is probably an independent thinker willing to incorporate worthy ideas regardless of where they come from.
Greg Abbott’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is the exception that proves this rule.
The Texas governor has both conservatives and progressives mad at him right now but not because he has made bold moves that defy partisan orthodoxy.
It’s because he’s a weak, vacillating leader who can’t stick to a sensible course for very long without feeling compelled to pander to his right-wing base.
He’s always looking over his shoulder at Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a social-issue firebrand whose legacy will forever be defined by his crusade to force transgender boys into girls’ restrooms and transgender girls into boys’ restrooms.
Abbott wants to be the adult in the room, but he also desperately wants the kids to approve of him.
The governor tries to camouflage his weakness with showy displays of executive authority. But there’s no consistent principle at work other than political nervousness — the fear of rejection from his own base.
The latest exhibit in Abbott’s gallery of cowardice came Thursday with his proclamation that he would shut down the use of satellite county elections offices for absentee voters wanting to personally deliver their ballots, rather than drop them in the mail.
Voters now will have only one site in each county to drop off a mail ballot. Abbott’s proclamation also stipulated that poll watchers be given the opportunity to observe the drop-off process.
This move serves no positive purpose. It solves no existing problem. It simply, and callously, strikes a blow against the idea that we should make the voting process convenient, safe and accessible during this public health crisis.
In Harris County, which includes the city of Houston, 4.7 million people, spread out over nearly 1,800 square miles, will have exactly one location at which they can drop off a mail ballot. Eleven satellite offices that were previously available for drop offs can no longer be used.
In Travis County, three dropoff sites will no longer be available to voters.
Bexar County will see no direct impact from Abbott’s mandate, because our county employs an elections-administrator system and has only one election office. In counties such as Harris and Travis, the county clerk runs elections and since county clerks, by nature, tend to have satellite offices across a county, those satellite offices have functioned as drop-off sites.
Any voter wanting to drop off a ballot at a satellite office would have to present it to an elections administrator and provide proof of identification, just as they would at a main office. What is Abbott achieving by shutting down these valid options?
The obvious answer is that he’s suppressing the vote, by making people travel longer distances and wait in longer lines. He’s also adding some 11th-hour confusion for election officials who are already stressed by the demands of this unprecedented election year.
The maddening thing about this is that Abbott, on July 27, took some positive — if modest — steps to open up voting and make it safer during this pandemic.
He added a week to early voting and allowed voters to drop off mail ballots during the early voting period, rather than merely on Election Day.
By extending early voting, however, Abbott angered some of his fellow Republicans, who somehow found it objectionable to give Texans six extra days to vote in the middle of a pandemic that’s killed more than 200,000 Americans.
A Republican coalition — including state party chairman AllenWest and six GOP lawmakers — filed suit against Abbott less than two weeks ago over his expansion of early voting.
So, in the face of attacks from his political allies, Abbott choked. He had to show his voter-suppression bona fides to convince the base that he hadn’t wimped out. It was reminiscent of the way he prematurely abandoned his statewide COVID-19 lockdown in the spring after Patrick went on Fox News and pushed for the country to return to economic normalcy.
We paid for Abbott’s reversal on that issue with the lives of thousands of Texans. We’ll pay for his latest act of pandering in the disenfranchisement of Texas voters.
Seven months ago, Abbott was the closest thing we had in Texas to a unifying political figure; someone who managed to win re-election by more than 13 percentage points in 2018, while several of his fellow Republican statewide incumbents (including Patrick) scraped by with narrow victories.
The COVID-19 outbreak, however, has exposed all of Abbott’s flaws for anyone who couldn’t already see them. Things are sticking to the Teflon governor now and he can’t handle it.