Eased voting rules didn’t include Texas
Top GOP officials say their decisions aim to protect elections
In five states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, new policies allow all voters to use COVID-19 as an excuse to mail in their ballots. In Iowa, the Republican secretary of state sent absentee ballot applications for the November election to every active registered voter. And in Mississippi, one of the few states not offering universal absentee voting this year, Republican state leaders extended the deadline to receive mail ballots.
Republican lawmakers across the country, including those in battleground states with tight Senate races, have lifted restrictions and defied President Donald Trump’s unfounded warnings of mail-in voter fraud by expanding the practice, in an attempt to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at polling sites.
And then there is Texas, one of five states where voters cannot use fear of COVID-19 to vote by mail, one of 10 without widespread online voter registration and one of two without either option. Top Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have made a series of moves they say are necessary to protect election integrity — but also make it harder for Texans to cast ballots.
Democrats have condemned the actions as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression designed to prevent them from winning control of the Texas House and delivering the state’s 38 Electoral College votes to their presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
Republicans wave off those assertions, noting that the expanded voting policies sought by Democrats were not implemented in prior election cycles. And they point to Abbott’s decisions to add a week of in-person early voting and to let voters drop off mail ballots before Election Day — though the governor later undercut the latter move by limiting each county to one drop-off site, forcing Harris County to close 11 and prompting accusations of voter suppression from Democrats and lawsuits from civil rights groups.
Late Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Abbott’s order limiting mail ballot drop-off sites.
“There’s no question that the intent behind these moves is to cause there to be fewer Democrats voting,” said Joseph Fishkin, an elections expert at the University of Texas School of Law. “You want to call that voter suppression, I think that’s not unreasonable.”
Paxton has led the effort to halt voter expansion measures. The Texas Supreme Court largely sided with his argument in May against expanding mail-in voting during the pandemic, and on Wednesday it blocked the Harris County clerk from sending mail ballot applications to all registered voters as part of a lawsuit Paxton filed.
Abbott’s curtailing of mail ballot drop-offs came roughly aweek after the Texas Republican Party and six GOP state lawmakers joined Houston conservative ac-
tivist Steve Hotze in asking the state Supreme Court to rescind the extra week of early voting and prohibit voters from dropping off mail ballots before Election Day. The Texas and Harris County Republican Parties also had sued the county in an attempt to restrict the number of ballot drop-off sites.
Keith Nielsen, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, said voters already have ample post office and mailbox locations at which to drop off ballots. He said expanded voting measures “seem to leave a lot of openings for fraud and mistakes,” arguing that election administration is already a “monumental task” without a pandemic.
“Ifwe can’t have election integrity and safe and secure elections, then expansion should be off the table,” Nielsen said.
High-stakes election
Voting rights advocates say the moves are the latest in a long history of Republican attempts to restrict access to the ballot by exaggerating the risk posed by voter fraud. Paxton and other Republicans argue that fraudulent activity goes largely undiscovered and unchallenged, in part because such legal challenges are cumbersome and law enforcement agencies lack the resources to adequately address the issue.
“You’re never going to see thousands of cases coming out of an office that has three prosecutors, and we probably have more than most states,” Paxton told the Texas Public Policy Foundation last month. “So, it’s limited in what we can do, butwe try to send a message with what we do.”
No evidence supports that conclusion, said Vanita Gupta, who served as assistant attorney general for civil rights during the Obama administration. Study after study, she said, has shown that large-scale voter fraud does not occur anywhere in the country.
“The only explanation is that it all aligns with Texas officials trying to make voting less accessible and more difficult,” Gupta said. “And in this time of COVID, that is a very dangerous proposition, not just an unjust one.”
A Paxton spokeswoman declined comment on the voter suppression allegations.
The stakes are enormous in this year’s general election, as a Biden victory here could accompany Democrats flipping the state House of Representatives, ending unified Republican control of Texas government that has stood since 2003. Republican groups are pouring money into House races across the state in hopes of protecting the majority for next year’s once-a-decade redrawing of Texas’ political maps, a process that could stifle Democrats’ recent electoral gains.
The state has added more than 1.5 million voters in the past four years — a third of those in the solid blue counties of Harris, Travis and Bexar — suggesting Republicans could be imperiled in a high-turnout election with a historically unpopular incumbent president at the top of their ticket.
“The Republicans have some contradictory incentives; one is to keep the vote down to traditional levels, where they’ve done quite well,” said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “The other is to see this is going to be a high-turnout election and do everything they can to drive their voters out, knowing some of those voters are depressed, concerned about Donald Trump.”
Jillson said the conservative governments that controlled Texas — Democrats from Reconstruction until the 1990s, Republicans since — historically have made voting difficult as a means to retain power.
The Legislature in 2011 passed a voter ID lawthat a federal appeals court found disproportionately harmed minorities and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The same court later approved a watered-down version, preserving some of the strictest voter ID restrictions in any state.
Two months after Republicans lost seats in Congress and the Legislature in the 2018 midterms, former Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced a plan to purge 95,000 potential noncitizens from the state’s voter roll. It fell apart when county clerks within days found that 20,000 of those voters were citizens.
Pushback on mail ballots
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, which has raised questions about the safety of in-person voting. To qualify for an absentee ballot, the Texas Election Code requires voters to be 65 or older, disabled, in jail or out of their home county during the voting period.
The Texas Democratic Party sued in state and federal court, arguing that the risk of contracting COVID-19 at a polling place constituted a disability. Paxton disagreed, saying eligibility for mail voting should not be broadened.
The Texas Supreme Court sided with Paxton, ruling inMay that fear of the virus did not qualify a voter for an absentee ballot, though it could be combined with other health factors.
Then, inAugust, Paxtonsued to bar Harris County Clerk Christopher Hollins from sending mail ballot applications to every registered voter, arguing that the local Democratic official had abused his power. In aWednesday ruling, the Texas Supreme Court blocked the mailout.
On Oct. 1, Abbott limited counties to just one drop-off site, a move he said was necessary to “stop attempts at illegal voting.”
The move affected only large, leftleaning counties that had set up multiple sites: Harris had 12; Travis, 3; Fort Bend, 5. Hollins’ office set up the 12 locations throughout 1,777-square-mile-Harris-County to give voters an alternative to using the Postal Service amid concerns it would be unable to handle a surge in absentee ballots.
Voting rights groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens and the League of Women Voters, swiftly sued Abbott, arguing that older voters, minorities and those with underlying health conditions were harmed by the move.
The federal judge’s ruling Friday allows the counties to reopen the sites.
Abbott’s announcement surprised county clerks, especially because the state solicitor general argued in court two days earlier that multiple drop-off sites were permitted under the election plan the governor unveiled in July.
Paxton, as if to underscore his insistence that voting fraud is widespread, announced last month that he and the Gregg County district attorney brought charges against four people, alleging a mail ballot harvesting plot during the 2018 Democratic primary for a county commissioner seat. On Thursday, Paxton announced the arrest of a candidate for mayor of Carrollton on charges of mail ballot application fraud.
One of the Hotze lawsuits alleges, without evidence, that powerful Democrats in Harris County are orchestrating a similar scheme on a far larger scale — potentially involving 700,000 ballots, or about 29 percent of the current Harris County voter roll. Those accused of leading the scheme say the allegations are false, but the claims have been publicized by conservative websites and parroted by some Republican candidates.
The question, election law experts say, is the extent to which such actions will limit the number of Texans who turn out in this election.
Harris County is bracing for record turnout and has expanded voting hours and the number of polling sites, especially during the extended early voting period. The county already has processed 231,000 mail ballot applications, almost twice as many as in 2016.