Texas voter suppression is working
“Easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
How often we heard that refrain in 2021, as Texas Republicans executed their relentless pursuit of the phantom problem of voter fraud. Over and over again we were all told that election “integrity” legislation would secure the voting process and make it simpler.
It didn't matter that Texas already had the most stringent voting restrictions in the country, or that Attorney General Ken Paxton's quest to hunt down voter fraud unearthed three cases last year. It didn't matter that civil rights experts and the U.S. Department of Justice warned the bill would disenfranchise people of color, older voters and others. Republicans passed it anyway.
And now? Tens of thousands of Texans who voted by mail in the March 1 primary had their ballots thrown out.
Though the Secretary of State's Office has yet to complete an official count, an Associated Press analysis published Wednesday found Texas counties rejected nearly 23,000 mail ballots, largely due to technicalities newly required by Senate Bill 1.
The AP found that nearly 13 percent of mail ballots were thrown out across the 187 counties that provided data.
Here in the state's largest county, nearly 1 in 5 mail-in ballots were tossed. Harris County received 36,878 mail ballots for the 2022 primary, and 6,888 mail ballots, or 18.7 percent, were ultimately rejected. In the 2018 primary, just 135 of the 48,473 mail ballots received were rejected, or 0.27 percent.
Did the new rules weed out fraudulent voters? Hardly. Voters were apparently confused by a new rule that requires would-be voters to provide either a partial Social Security number or a Texas driver's license number. Fair enough, except that if you provided a perfectly valid Social Security number, but used your license number when you registered to vote — something you might have done years ago — then your ballot was rejected.
Some whose ballots were rejected had time to try again, or could just show up in person, but we'll never know how many of those 23,000 voters were simply shut out of the process for the most persnickety of reasons.
That GOP mantra — to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat — is a good start, or would be if they only meant it. Or if their efforts to make elections more secure were more than just a costly, pernicious snipe hunt, looking for widespread voter fraud that simply doesn't exist.
Texans deserve a system in which they can register to vote and cast their ballot without fuss. Heck, dozens of states make registration possible using the internet. Voters should also be able to trust that ballots are being competently counted. Across the country, citizens do just that. And then there's Texas.
In this month's primary, thousands of voters tried to have their voices heard and were rebuffed.
Our state's leaders should be stopping in their tracks and vowing to make sure this never happens again. But that's not happening.
Has Gov. Greg Abbott decried the sharp increase in rejected ballots? Has Paxton vowed to make sure no one who is eligible to vote is kicked out of the system just because they misremembered which ID number they registered with? No. The Secretary of State's Office said they plan to devote “a significant portion of our voter education campaign” to enhancing awareness of the new requirements. That's something, but we need a lot more.
These new rules are frustrating to everyone, as all voters can make simple mistakes like the ones that kicked all those votes out of the system this time around.
But those with more resources and more experience dealing with bureaucracy will tend to more easily navigate the roadblocks Republican lawmakers put in the way.
In the past, requiring voters to jump through unnecessary hoops has disproportionately affected Black voters, and we weren't surprised to learn this week that in this way at least, history is repeating itself. The Harris County elections office told us Wednesday that of the 138 county ZIP codes that had rejected ballots, the rate of rejection in
ZIP codes with a Black plurality was roughly double that of ZIP codes with a white plurality.
In countless ways, 2022 is not 1965. But it is troubling, and infuriating, that nearly six decades after we eradicated racist literacy tests, we yet again have leaders instituting rules that obfuscate the electoral process and cause voters to throw up their hands as their ballots are thrown in the trash.
Sam Taylor from the Secretary of State's Office told us we'll get an official count of rejected ballots soon after March 31, which is the deadline for counties to report voting history data.
He also pointed out that new county reporting requirements set out in SB 1 helped his office catch 10,181 overlooked votes in Harris County days after the election. There are useful mechanisms in the bill.
But county officials being forced to throw out nearly 1 in 5 mail ballots because of this legislation? Simply not acceptable.
The near-miss with the Harris County ballots was just one part of an election fiasco that has the Democrats who run Harris County on the hot seat — and elections administrator Isabel Longoria in the process of resigning. That anger was appropriate, as we argued at the time, but who will
take responsibility for the new state rules that have led to mounds of tossed ballots? Who will come forward to make it right?
We won't hold our breath waiting. Silence from Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Republicans in the Texas Legislature only lend credence to the view that this disenfranchisement was by design.
Though the rejection rates were higher in Democratic-leaning counties than in Republican ones — 15.1 percent to 9.1 percent — people of all races, parties and ages were impacted, and all Texans should be outraged by the knowledge that their neighbors' votes were cast aside in huge numbers.
Texas should be better than this — better than throwing out votes, and better than setting up confusing roadblocks. Instead we're stuck with a process that's made it harder to vote, and easier to cheat people out of their fundamental right to have a say in how they are governed.