San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New voting law already limiting access to ballots
AUSTIN, Texas — A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information. The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Biden.
Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office.
Protesters gather in Tyler, Texas, in September to demonstrate against legislation that further tightens state voting laws. Democrats and rights groups are raising alarms about the impact.
Then last week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four
digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections
at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”