Voters don’t have to succumb to Senate Bill 1

Willie Nelson and voter suppression.

Two Texas institutions, one of them soulful and big-hearted, the other churlish and exclusionary.

Over the past month, these two Texas institutions intersected when Nelson initially had his primary election ballot rejected because he failed to comply with new rules designed to tamp down mail voting in this state.

The 89-year-old music legend’s wife, Annie D’Angelo, told the Austin American-Statesman that she and Nelson had their mail ballots refused twice before they were able to fix identification problems and get their votes counted in Travis County.

“If they’re doing it to Willie Nelson,” she said, “what happens to an 89-year-old woman at home without a lot of help?”

It’s a good question. The answer isn’t pretty.

Statewide, almost 23,000 mail ballots were tossed during the March 1 primary.

Nearly 4,000 of those rejected ballots came from Bexar County. In a typical election, about 2 percent of mail ballots get thrown out. This time around, Bexar County threw out 22 percent of the submitted mail ballots.

The disenfranchisement cut across partisan lines: 24 percent of Democratic votes and 20 percent of Republican votes in the county were disqualified.

It’s the sad product of Senate Bill 1, the Republican-driven election law enacted last year; a piece of legislation so divisive that House Democrats broke quorum and bolted to Washington, D.C., in a futile bid to block its passage.

GOP lawmakers — working on the assumption that big turnout benefits Democrats — took their garden shears to various aspects of election accessibility (drivethru voting, 24-hour voting) in a bid to reduce turnout.

In the case of mail voting, which Democrats tend to do better (partly because, unlike Republicans, they don’t relentlessly tell their voters that voting by mail is an evil scam), Republican legislators didn’t bother to muster a credible show of election-integrity theater.

They banned election officials from sending unsolicited mailballot applications to voters, even though candidates (including many Republicans) routinely send those same applications to their supporters.

They also created arbitrary new hoops for mail voters to navigate, undoubtedly aware that the new rules would drive up the number of rejected ballots.

Mail voters must now include either their full driver’s license number or the final four digits of their Social Security number on the outside of the envelope containing the ballot.

Let’s say you provided a Social Security number when you registered to vote, but used your driver’s license number on the mail ballot (or the mail-ballot envelope). Even if both forms are correct, your ballot will get thrown out because the numbers don’t match.

The disenfranchisement hit close to home for Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez.

Rodriguez says his mother had her mail ballot rejected, even though she accurately completed the ballot. She simply failed to write the newly required information on the envelope.

“She sent off her ballot, and then she got what I understand hundreds, if not thousands, of people locally got back,” Rodriguez said. “It was a document that essentially said, ‘You have to cure your ballot and it has to be done in person.’

“The profile (of mail voters) is usually seniors, disabled, those that are away from the county. So it kind of defeats the purpose if you’re then saying, ‘You’ve got to appear in person by this certain day to cure your ballot.’ So she didn’t get the opportunity to do that.”

Rodriguez is leading an effort on Commissioners Court to improve the mail-voting process so we don’t again encounter the astronomical rejection rate we saw for the March 1 primary. He has enlisted the Civil Division of the District Attorney’s office to come up with a plan to increase public awareness and help voters comply with the new rules.

“We’re not trying to skirt the law,” Rodriguez said. “But is there something that we can do that just makes compliance with the law any easier?

“Absent that, we’re going to put some resources in, whether it’s a PR campaign, a messaging campaign, hiring folks to help with this additional step, whatever it takes.”

Jacque Callanen, Bexar County’s elections administrator, said her office hopes to include a quarter-sheet paper insert with the ballots (and ballot applications) it sends to voters. The insert will feature large-print mail-voting instructions.

She also said her office will be better equipped in future elections to handle a high volume of problematic mail ballots.

“Now that we’ve lived through it, we’ve got a better handle on it,” Callanen said. “But we didn’t have any direction (from the state). It was sink or swim, and some of us dog-paddled our way through it.”

For the foreseeable future, we’ve got to live with SB 1. But we can’t succumb to it.

Kin Man Hui / Staff file photo Voters hand deliver their mail ballots on Oct. 15, 2020, at Bexar County elections headquarters. At the same time, others waited in line to cast ballots on the third day of early voting.