Texas leads effort to stifle vote, critics say
At Summit on Race, state officials accused of intimidation tactics
AUSTIN — Julieta Garibay, a native of Mexico City, was brought to Texas by her mother when she was 12. For 26 years, she was told to assimilate and stay quiet so people wouldn’t hear her accent. Last April, she became a citizen and registered to vote.
In January the state flagged her as one of the 95,000 suspected non-citizens registered to vote, on a list that the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, trumpeted on social media in all caps as a “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” It took less than a day for local election officials to find glaring errors on the list, noting many people, including Garibay, were naturalized U.S. citizens and were wrongfully included on it.
“They were trying to say a bunch of U.S. citizens had actually committed fraud,” said Garibay, Texas director and co-founder of United We Dream, an Austinbased immigrant rights group. She is also the lead plaintiff in a
lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund against the state over the list she says illegally targeted herself and other citizens who are foreign-born.
“That’s one of the new tactics that they’re using. How do you put fear into people to believe that there is voter fraud happening in Texas and in many other states? How do you make sure you keep them quiet?” she said.
Garibay was one of the speakers at The Summit on Race in America, a three-day symposium this week hosted by the LBJ Foundation in Austin featuring civil rights icons, leaders, activists, musicians and comedians examining the progress and failures of the past half-century. Among the biggest challenges discussed were state-led efforts to chip away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The Texas Legislature now is considering a bill that would punish those who vote illegally with up to two years in jail. Even if the illegal vote was a mistake — for example, a felon who didn’t know he was ineligible to vote until his probation ended — the penalty would be the same as for felony charges such as driving drunk with a child in the car or stealing up to $20,000. It wouldn’t matter if the ballot was never counted.
“We don’t really understand the argument about the chilling effect that would have,” said Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, who is sponsoring the bill. “We’re trying to thread the needle to make sure folks aren’t cheating while we try to protect the right of every eligible voter.”
Low voter turnout
As Hughes and other advocates for the measure say the stiff penalty is needed to ensure the integrity of elections, voting rights advocates say the plan is the latest in a long list of attempts by Republicans here and across the country to suppress voter turnout by intimidating black people, Latinos, immigrants and poor people.
Allegations of widespread voter fraud have become a rallying cry for Republicans, though evidence hasn’t borne it out. During his own election and afterward, President Donald Trump made repeated unsubstantiated claims of illegal votes.
Florida sought to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls in 2012 and initially flagged 180,000 people. The number soon shrank to 2,600 and ultimately just 85 voters were taken off the rolls, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
The attempted noncitizen voter purge in Texas, which was halted by a federal judge in February amid claims that it was calculated to intimidate immigrants, is now the source of an investigation launched by Democrats in the U.S. House.
On Thursday, Paxton denied a demand for documents from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Paxton is arguing the federal government has no jurisdiction over his office, or that of the Texas Secretary of State — setting up a potential court fight that would pit the reach of the Voting Rights Act against the rights of states to manage their own voter rolls.
Texas has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country — No. 41 in the country with 46.3 percent turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, compared to 50.1 percent nationwide, according to the United States Elections Project.
Critics say Texas lawmakers have purposely created hurdles for voters. For example, Texans have to register to vote at least 30 days before Election Day — the earliest deadline federal law allows. A dozen other states make voters register that early, although 17 states allow voters to register on Election Day.
Targeting the poor
Online voter registration is nonexistent in Texas, in part because the state will not accept photographs of signatures. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia currently or will soon provide online voter registration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.
Yet in October 2018, Texas rejected 2,400 attempted online voter registrations forwarded from Vote.org, a nonpartisan group that helped people in Dallas, Bexar, Cameron and Travis Counties register to vote. The state tossed their registrations because they submitted digital photos of their signatures.
Voting rights activists say the most potent attempt to suppress turnout in Texas is requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. A federal court of appeals first struck down the Texas voter ID law passed in 2011, saying it discriminated against black and Hispanic voters who lack government-issued photo ID. The Legislature revised the law in 2017 to allow voters without one of the seven approved forms of ID to sign an affidavit explaining why they could not obtain one. The same federal court upheld the revised law.
“If you’re poor, you probably don’t have the money to pay the fee for your birth certificate or travel to the place you need to travel to get the photo ID,” said Dan Quinn, a spokesman from Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization supporting religious freedom, individual liberties and public education. “You can pass laws that sound on their face that they’re treating everybody equally when in reality, they don’t. The truth is the people who pass those laws know that and that’s why they pass them the way they do.”