State sued over limits on voting by mail
RISKS: Democrats cite virus; GOP fears fraud
A group of voters and civil rights organizations filed a suit Monday challenging the state’s absentee voting restrictions, saying they will “unjustifiably risk the voting rights of Texans” during the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s the latest in a wave of suits launched by Democrats and civic organizations seeking to pry open the state’s strict voting laws in the months leading up to the general election.
Texas is one of the few states that still require voters younger than 65 to have an excuse to cast a ballot by mail. Fewer than 7 percent of Texas voters mailed in ballots in 2018.
“The situation that we find ourselves in is totally inadequate and dangerous to our health if we go strictly by the laws that are now in place,” said one of the plaintiffs, Linda Jann Lewis, 73, of Waco. “We are months away from November — now is the time for our state government to pay attention to the
pandemic and the lives that are at risk.”
The suits had been multiplying quickly even before the pandemic, and the health crisis has only increased the urgency as Democrats press to reverse the restrictions defended by Texas Republicans who say they are concerned about potential voter fraud.
Public opinion in recent months has favored voting by mail, polling shows. A Pew Research Center poll late last month found that almost 3 out of 4 Americans favor universal access to mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, including about half of Republicans.
Despite resistance from top officials in the state and from the Trump administration, at least one Texas county has already put aside funding to expand mail-in voting even before the court cases are resolved.
The suit filed Monday challenges four restrictions on Texas ballots submitted by mail: Three of them are the requirements that voters pay for postage to return ballots by mail, postmark them by 7 p.m. on Election Day and submit handwriting samples that match. The fourth restriction criminalizes use of third-party assistance in returning marked ballots.
The plaintiffs are represented by the National Redistricting Foundation, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
“Given the life and death consequences of the pandemic with which the nation is still grappling, Texas’ current absentee voting restrictions must be eliminated because they will severely burden those who wish to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Holder said in a statement. “These restrictions force voters into an untenable choice: personal safety or community participation. Under no circumstances should Texas be allowed to force citizens to choose between casting a ballot and staying healthy.”
A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which represents state agencies including the secretary of state’s office, said in response to the suit: “We will continue to uphold the law and protect the integrity of the election process.”
Complaint targets Paxton
The plaintiffs include Voto Latino, the Texas State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans. They seek a preliminary injunction that would block all four restrictions.
Jann Lewis, one of five individual plaintiffs, said she worries about repeating what happened in Wisconsin, where people were forced to choose whether to risk their health to vote in the state’s April 7 primary election. More than 50 people who voted in person or worked the polls during that election have tested positive for COVID-19.
Also Monday, two voting rights advocates filed a complaint with the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, alleging Paxton committed voter fraud in each of the state’s 254 counties by contradicting a judge’s order to temporarily expand the availability of mail-in voting during the pandemic.
District Judge Tim Sulak in Travis County on April 17 issued a temporary injunction enabling any voter to request a mail-in ballot by claiming that their health would be jeopardized by going to the polls.
Paxton, a Republican who has argued voting by mail should be reserved only for those who currently qualify for it, wrote in a filing that Sulak’s order was automatically stayed when he appealed it.
Further, Paxton threatened to criminally prosecute local elections officials who use Sulak’s order to justify an expansion of mailin voting. (Paxton himself is under criminal indictment for securities fraud and has been awaiting a trial for almost five years; he was reelected in November 2018.)
The Texas Democratic Party and voters have filed an identical suit to the one in Sulak’s court in federal court. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Friday.
In the meantime, Sulak’s order stopped Travis County from preventing its voters from seeking a ballot using a coronavirus-related disability claim. It also prohibited the county and the attorney general’s office from publishing any guidance to the contrary in any of Texas’ other 253 counties.
That’s left enough of a gray area that Harris County is already preparing for expanded mail-in voting. At the end of April, the county budgeted about $12 million to the cause.
“No matter what the courts and the state decide for the July and November elections, we must be prepared for an increase in mail ballots, which we are already seeing,” County Clerk Diane Trautman said at the time.
A similar battle is playing out at the federal level: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she wants to include up to $4 billion for voteby-mail ballots in the next pandemic response package.
Senate Republicans and the Trump administration have pushed back hard against the idea of the federal government directing states and have cited concerns about mail-in voting’s susceptibility to voter fraud.
In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, passed at the end of March, Democrats worked out $400 million for election security grants, which can be used to expand vote-by-mail and early voting, though a fund-matching provision has slowed the process of distributing the funds.