County officials decry voting law snags
GOP lawmaker assigns blame for high rates of rejected mail-in ballots to a learning curve
Texas Republicans’ tagline for the elections bill full of new restrictions passed last year was that it would make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
But election officials across the state are casting doubt on the “easy to vote” part, reporting never-before-seen rates of rejection for hundreds of mail ballots stemming from new ID requirements in Senate Bill 1. Voters can correct their ballots, but the clock is ticking as the March 1 primary approaches. Previously, confusion over the same requirements led to hundreds of rejections of requests for mail ballots. Officials also say they have lost the ability to speak freely with voters about absentee voting options for fear of facing felony charges prescribed by the bill.
Democrats who walked out of the Capitol for two months in attempts to scuttle the legislation predicted these sorts of problems.
“Texans’ votes are being rejected under the GOP’s new anti-voter legislation, disproportionately hurting our senior citizens,” said Houston state Rep. Ann Johnson in a tweet. “Texas Democrats will continue fighting to protect the freedom to vote & to expand — not restrict — access to the ballot box.”
Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who helped craft the bill, chalked up the ballot rejection issues to a learning curve. He noted that the number of ballot application rejections statewide (of the counties reporting data to the secretary of state) has dropped to 4.7 percent as of Feb. 4, down from 8.7 percent at the end of last month.
“I think we’ll see a similar type of reduction (with ballots) as people get used to the system,” he said.
Bettencourt said the state’s ballot tracker site is a good resource for making corrections that was also required by SB 1.
Harris County officials reported Friday that about 40 percent of filled-in mail ballots — or 1,430 out of 3,579 — have so far been rejected because of a missing ID number and will be sent back to voters to correct. The county is still determining how many will have to be corrected because the voter used an ID number that doesn’t match what the county has on file.
Those nearly 4,000 ballots received make up only 13 percent of the more than 27,000 sent out by the county. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Feb. 18, so that number could grow.
Other counties also have reported high rejection rates, such as Hays and Williamson in the Austin metropolitan area, which will each need to send back about 30 percent of ballots for correction, the Texas Tribune first reported. In Dallas County, 28 percent of ballots had been rejected as of Thursday, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Statewide numbers are not available from the secretary of state, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Voters whose ballots were rejected will have an opportunity to correct them by mail, or, if the deadline is coming up too soon, officials will call or email voters. They would need to then go to their local elections office in person. Another option would be to use the state’s new online ballot tracker to correct any mistakes.
Completed ballots have to be postmarked by 7 p.m. March 1. They also can be delivered in person on Election Day.
Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, author of the legislation, had for months insisted that Democrats’ outcry over the bill’s potential to cause voter suppression was unwarranted.
“This is a bill we can be proud of,” Hughes said just before it passed. “How much fraud is OK? None. How much suppression is OK? None.”
Hughes has not responded to multiple requests for interviews, including on Friday, as problem arise with implementing the new legislation.
Not easy in first place
SB1 created an added layer of voting requirements in a state that already has some of the strictest in the nation for voting by mail. Voters now have to include a state ID number, such as a driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number, when applying for a mail-in ballot and when submitting their ballot.
Some county officials have advised voters to include both numbers, just in case.
The location of the space to include an ID number on the new carrier envelopes could be part of what’s throwing off some voters, election officials said. To protect the voter’s privacy, the field is located underneath the envelope flap — easy to miss if a voter isn’t looking out for it.
Just two states, Alabama and Wisconsin, had ID requirements in 2020 for voters requesting a mail-in ballot. But last year, Republicans in nearly a dozen states offered up bills limiting the method after its heyday during the pandemic. Texas and at least three other states enacted them: Arkansas, Florida and Georgia, according to Voting Rights Lab, which advocates for expanded voter access.
Texas already limits absentee voting to people who are 65 or older, disabled, in jail or out of their home county during the voting period.
Harris County elections spokeswoman Leah Shah said the office has received a record 8,000 calls since Jan. 1, the majority having to do with mail ballots and applications. That’s more than the monthly call volume in the runup to the 2020 general election.
Preliminary injunction
Also Friday, Harris County attorneys urged a federal judge in San Antonio to temporarily block a provision of SB1 that they say muzzles election officials who want to provide information to the public about voting by mail without fear of criminal prosecution.
The law made it a felony offense for any election official who “solicits the submission of an application to vote by mail from a person who did not request an application” punishable by up to two years in jail and $10,000 in fines.
The prospect of a felony charge has had a chilling effect on Harris County election administrator Isabel Longoria and others who may want to encourage voters to cast their ballots by mail or “give mere truthful advice in response to questions from individual voters” but worry about becoming the target of “retaliatory or discriminatory prosecution,” the suit argues.
This year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton convened a grand jury to consider charges against Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir for obstructing a poll watcher, as the Austin AmericanStatesman reported. The grand jury tossed the case in April, but DeBeauvoir said it felt like a politically motivated attack to intimidate her.
District Judge Xavier Rodriguez late Friday granted a preliminary injunction in the case, citing a likelihood that Harris County will prevail in its arguments that the anti-solicitation provision “constitutes unlawful viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, both facially and as applied to Plaintiffs’ speech.”
Throughout the roughly fourhour hearing, Rodriguez repeatedly said arguments from the attorney general’s office seemed contradictory, that the law is problematic and that it is written too vaguely. At one point, he told the state’s lawyers: “Don’t get cute with me.”
“How old is Ms. Morgan?” the judge asked one of them at another point about Cathy Morgan, a volunteer deputy registrar in Travis and Williamson counties, who is one of the plaintiffs. When the state answered that she is in her 70s, he added: “And you want to throw her in jail?”
Voting by mail is legal, state attorneys said, but it’s not preferable to voting in person, so the purpose of the law is to stop government resources from being used to encourage voting by mail instead of in person.
Longoria said helping people vote by mail is part of her job.
“I feel compelled, that it’s my duty, to help voters vote,” Longoria said. “I can talk about voter registration, I can talk about inperson voting, but when it comes to voting by mail, I have to stop. To be very careful with my words.
“I stop midsentence sometimes at these town halls and say the law prevents me from saying much more,” Longoria said. “If you have a question, good luck and call us, but I’m tentative to overreach in this moment.”