Poll: Texans support moves to increase access to voting
As state Republicans push to restrict voting, a new poll shows a majority of Texans want more time to vote early and do not approve of threatening voters or those who assist them with felony charges for violations.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have highlighted combating voter fraud as a top priority this session, but the poll found 66 percent said they don’t believe significant fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. Republican officeholders largely held their own in Texas last year even as Joe Biden fared better than any Democratic presidential candidate in decades.
“Overwhelmingly, 97 percent of Texans said they had a good experience with the election, so it’s really a little confusing about why we’re looking at restricting ballot access … and moreover in a time when Republicans overperformed what many people thought they would in Texas,” said Sarah Walker, executive director of Secure Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that solicited the Ragnar Research poll.
Walker’s organization found that fewer than 1 in 5 Texas Republicans voted on Election Day, and 64 percent of all Republican votes were cast early and nearly one-quarter by mail.
Democrats made bold predictions about another
“blue wave” ahead of the 2020 election, targeting 10 congressional seats and aiming to flip the Texas House. But Republicans maintained their dominance at the statehouse, and Democrats didn’t end up winning any new seats in the U.S. House.
The survey was done by Chris Perkins, a data analyst who has polled for many Republican candidates over the last decade.
It was conducted March 7 to 9 by landline and cellphone and included 1,002 people considered likely voters across Texas. Quotas on various demographics were used to ensure a representative distribution; the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The wide-ranging Senate Bill 7, a priority for Patrick, and several other standalone bills filed this session by Republican lawmakers seek to clamp down on expansions to voting access implemented in last year’s election to curb what they say, without evidence, is greater opportunity for voter fraud.
Many of the expansions were pioneered by Harris County last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, such as overnight and late-night voting as well as drive-thru voting in which voters could cast their vote on a tablet handed to them through their vehicle window. Bills proposed this session would limit voting hours to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and ban drive-thru voting.
Democrats have filed bills to preserve some of those changes, such as by making permanent a oneweek extension of early voting that Abbott permitted last year to make voting safer during the pandemic.
The Ragnar poll found 73 percent of respondents approved of an extra week of early voting, including 58 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents.
Early voting on weekends was even more popular, with 89 percent in support.
Eighty-four percent also said they supported increasing the number of polling locations, but SB7 would require all countywide polling places to have the same number of voting machines, which could make it difficult for election officials to open new sites.
Some Republican-crafted legislation this session also seeks to increase the criminal penalty for voting mistakes, including by those assisting disabled voters who fail to fill out and mail ballots correctly.
SB7 would change the standard for prosecuting voter fraud from clear and certain to a preponderance of evidence, a lower standard of proof.
“My concern is that really decreases the threshold for making a claim,” Walker said. “And it’s going to result in a lot of potentially false claims and I think really threatens due process, one of our fundamental constitutional rights. … A felony is a huge burden to live with if you just make a simple mistake.”
In 2018, Crystal Mason, an African American woman from Fort Worth, was sentenced to five years in prison for casting an invalid provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election even though she said she did not know she was ineligible at the time and the vote was not counted.
Eighty-one percent of respondents said they supported voters having the necessary assistance to submit their ballots, and 62 percent said assistants should not be threatened with the possibility of a felony.
House Bill 330, which was introduced by Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-deer Park, the elections committee chair, would make it a state jail felony to list the wrong address on a voter registration application, to provide assistance to a voter who has not requested help, and for a voter to receive assistance if they do not have a disability that renders them unable to see or write.
Some measures contained in SB7 and other bills received bipartisan support in the Ragnar poll.
The requirement for an electronic mail ballot tracking system was favored by 83 percent of respondents, and the requirement that electronic voting machines provide an auditable paper trail was favored by 88 percent.