Fight to Vote: why Texas is a problem in 2020
Hello Fight to Vote readers,
This is one of those weeks where I don’t even know where to start. The president is garnering headlines with his antics after being diagnosed with Covid-19, yet of far greater significance are the hundreds of battles across the country contesting voting restrictions.
Maybe it’s better to focus on one place at a time, and Texas is on my mind.
Why is Texas so important this year?
Biden and Trump are polling neck and neck in Texas.
Texas is the second most populous state in the country, and has a whopping 38 electoral votes, second only to California. Some experts say that if more people in Texas were allowed to vote, Texas wouldn’t be a red state but a purple swing state, with a more equal distribution of Republican and Democrat voters.
What’s going wrong in Texas?
The Lone Star State is known for making it difficult to vote, and voter turnout is almost always lower in Texas than the national average.
But this year, Governor Greg Abbott has taken this to new extremes. As we reported this week, he has decreed that counties can offer only one drop-off site for mail-in ballots – despite the fact that many people will probably want to avoid using the postal service because of the delays being reported across the country.
This will force some Texans to travel immense distances simply to vote, the very definition of voter suppression. Take Harris county, home to Houston – it is the size of a smaller US state, and yet has only one place to drop off a ballot.
This ruling will hit Texas’s diverse cities the hardest.
Furthermore, the all-Republican Texas supreme court ruled on Wednesday that the city of Houston could not proactively send mail-in ballot applications to its 2 million voters. These decisions have been met with outrage, and civil rights groups such as the NAACP have already started contesting them.
That’s not all
Texas, which is largely run by Republicans, has upheld voting restrictions for decades.
There’s no online voter registration. Early voting is limited.
Officials have to allow official poll watchers on site, despite fear of voter intimidation.
Polling station numbers have been cut (though sometimes they have more capacity).
OK, what about the rest of the country?
A record number of voters are casting their ballots via mail and early voting – an estimated 4 million have already voted, according to Reuters.
Some voters are experiencing voteby-mail snafus across the country, such as an Ohio county sending out two ballots to voters. Many errors can be linked back to a significant lack of federal funding for election officials.
And USPS delays are still plaguing the country.
Don’t stress, though, Billie Eilish is here to save us The electropop star announced a new initiative just weeks before the election encouraging her young fans to vote. This is a demographic that often doesn’t turn out in force at the polls – sometimes because of apathy, other times because of voter suppression geared toward college-aged voters.
She announced her initiative Just Vote on Instagram and encouraged first-time voters to engage via text to check their registration and find other crucial information. Sounds like she’s trying to get rid of a certain “bad guy”. See you next week,Ankita
Fight to Vote is delivered to thousands of inboxes every Thursday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now