Minorities faced voting problems, report finds
Hundreds were delayed from voting and others were nearly turned away entirely during the presidential election because of confusion over current state voter ID laws, a new report from a voting rights advocacy group shows.
It’s just one of numerous problems Texas voters — particularly minority groups — faced during the 2016 election cycle, according to a report by the Texas Civil Rights Project.
“Unfortunately, throughout the state, voters faced numerous obstacles that complicated the process,” said Beth Stevens, voting rights director for the nonprofit that released the report Thursday. “Through our Election Protection Coalition, we heard directly from thousands of voters about the barriers they faced in our electoral system.”
The first-of-its-kind, Texas-based report on voter issues was limited in scope to more than 4,000 incidents that were logged. Of the 3,100 callers who specified their race, 52 percent of cases came from Latino or Hispanic voters and 20 percent from black or African-American voters. But Stevens said it’s safe to assume more Texans experienced similar obstacles but didn’t know how to report them.
“Common sense says that there is a whole subset of voters that didn’t know who to call and just walked away,” she said.
Polling place problems
Of the 4,000 incidents that were tracked by a coalition of voting advocacy groups during the presidential election, most were issues related to polling place problems, voter registration status or voter ID requirements.
TCRP Communications Director Zenén Jaimes Pérez said the organization has trained researchers who go through a process that includes checking data in verifying claims made by callers. This means any claim that does not add up during the verification process is nixed, so hundreds of reported cases throughout the state were left out, Pérez said.
The report also showed the number of provisional ballots, which are given to voters when their registration information is in doubt to still record their candidate preferences, went up statewide. However, Bexar County still had the lowest number compared with the state’s other large counties.
More highlights from across the state:
Hundreds of callers reported they were not on the voter rolls because of slight discrepancies in their names or addresses.
A total of 123 people during early voting and 186 on Election Day called to report confusion about voter identification requirements, often prompted by misleading information at polling locations or inaccurate information from poll workers.
About 57 percent of calls were related to polling location problems, most notably, polling sites being changed or eliminated. Most of the reports came from predominately black areas of Houston, the report showed.
Many voters reported wait times in excess of one hour, noting that few poll workers were there to process voters or that multiple machines were either inoperable or not being used. This includes Bexar, Brazoria and Dallas counties.
Voter discrimination
The report comes nearly a year after a federal appeals court first ruled the state’s strict 2011 voter ID law discriminated against minorities and the poor. That law would have required all voters to present a government-issued ID. Before that law, voters needed only to bring a voter registration card.
Supporters of the tougher ID law, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have said they are needed to prevent voter fraud. But critics argued such requirements disenfranchise poor and minority voters, who face difficulties obtaining IDs. More than 600,000 Texas voters lack a suitable ID under the law.
Even though the court ordered voters who did not have one of the forms of ID must still be allowed to vote, many polling sites during early voting included signs that said voter ID was required with no reference to allowable exceptions. Several polling sites in counties such as Bexar and Dallas had instances where misleading signs were posted in the first few days of the early voting period, according to the report.
“The inaccurate signage and misinformation combined with apparent failures in poll worker training resulted in at least several cases where voters were almost wrongly turned away,” the TCRP’s report showed.
That coalition is led by the TCRP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund and Texas Common Cause.