The election day is getting closer. Nov. 5 weighs heavy on voters’ minds. The question lingers, “Is it getting harder to vote in Texas?” with Republican governor Greg Abbott purging more than 1.1 million voters from the list of eligible voters since September 2021. He also signed an election integrity bill into law.
Officials claim the premise of removing the voters was to maintain voter rolls and eliminate those people who were dead or had changed their address. However, Democratic leaders questioned the timing of the announcement and feared the possibility of voter suppression.
“Most of this stuff is extremely, extremely routine. But the fact that he [Abbott] wants to put out a press release on this rather than, for example, how many people they registered to vote, which is also a really large number, tells you something about it,” Marc E. Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and chair of the Elias Law Group said in an interview.
Paxton launched an election integrity advisory in August that included a tip line for the public to report suspected violations of election law.
“It has been the overriding goal of the Republican party since 2020: make it harder to vote. Texas has done that for decades, but it kicked into overdrive in 2021, targeting all the methods that counties have tried to use to increase voter participation in this very low participation state,” said Ari Berman, Mother Jones’ national voting rights correspondent and the author of a new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, at the Texas Tribune Festival during a panel discussion titled “Unsuppressed.”
Berman said that states like Minnesota have automatic voter registration, a no-excuse absentee ballot [June 1, 2024], and weeks of early voting to make it easier to vote from home. Texas only has early voting. In 2021, Berman said there were three million unregistered voters in Texas, out of which two million would vote Democratic if they were to register and reach the polls.
“If you look at the demographics, they’re disproportionately young and people of color, they are not likely to vote for Ken Paxton or Greg Abbott if they’re registered to vote,” he said. “It’s so difficult to register to vote with no online order registration.”
Berman recalled Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign when he famously visited all 254 counties in Texas in 2018 as a challenge against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. “It’s a crazy system that’s a direct replica of Jim Crow,” he added.
In Harris County, commissioners are constructing a response to a letter sent by Attorney General Ken Paxton threatening a lawsuit if they sent out unsolicited voter registration applications in the mail.
Voting Rights Activist Stacey Abrams, who was the first African-American woman major-party gubernatorial nominee in the 2018 and 2022 Georgia, says voter suppression by “bad actors” erodes civic will.
“They are trying to scare you into inaction, it’s a paralytic that works. But what’s worse is that we know that civic action is contagious. When we do it, we get more of it,” Abrams said during the discussion. “So their intention is this reverse contagion where we become so afraid of engagement that they can win without fighting.”
Where the discourse on voter suppression stems from
In August, Texas authorities also seized a Democratic candidate for the Texas House’s phone and searched the house of a legislative aide after allegations of a Frio County political operator illegally garnering votes for local races.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and owner of X, chimed in, “As I’ve said before, the Dems are importing voters.” He also retweeted a false claim that around 2 million noncitizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
On Aug. 21, Paxton launched an investigation into reports that alleged organizations were “unlawfully registering” noncitizens to vote, a violation of state and federal law. As part of this investigation, Paxton’s team went undercover to identify these organizations. It found that nonprofit organizations operated booths outside the Department of Public Safety Driver License offices and offered to help people register to vote. Paxton’s office argued that all citizens had already been given the opportunity to register to vote while renewing or being issued an ID card or driver’s license, which made the assistance redundant. However, the Parker County Republican chair and election administrator debunked these claims made by a Fox News host that sparked the investigations. They said there is no evidence of migrants registering to vote outside a state driver’s license facility west of Fort Worth.
Recently, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the largest and oldest Hispanic and Latin-American civil rights organization in the country, was a target of such a raid. In turn, LULAC requested the Justice Department to investigate Paxton’s office for Voting Rights Act violations, accusing it of conducting searches illegally.
“These actions echo a troubling history of voter suppression and intimidation that has long targeted both Black and Latino communities, particularly in states like Texas, where demographic changes have increasingly shifted the political landscape,” the letter read. “In Texas, tactics such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation were used to disenfranchise Latino voters. The infamous “white primary” system excluded Latino and Black citizens from participating in primary elections, which were effectively the only meaningful elections in the one-party South.”
Berman believes that the Republican Party has been to prevent demographic changes from having political changes.
“You have a white Republican leadership in Texas that is dramatically out of step with the demographics of the state, and they are trying to do everything they can to rid the political process to prevent those new demographic groups from having political power,” he explained.
This year, the Secretary of State’s Office will assign state inspectors to observe ballot counting and supervise election records in Harris County. The agency released an audit report that found election officials in the county failed to follow rules on voter registration list maintenance and training election workers, which led to issues during the county’s elections in 2021 and 2022.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said key bills regarding voter integrity and elections pass the Texas Senate but meet an untimely death in the House under Speaker Dade Phelan, naming 23 bills in particular.
“These bills would have been a step toward restoring the public’s confidence in fair and honest elections in the State of Texas. It’s an absolute disgrace that Speaker Phelan killed these critical bills,” said Lt. Gov. Patrick.
Moreover, Senator Paul Bettencourt of District 7 accused the Harris County Commissioners Court of attempting to take over the responsibility of voter registration from the voter registrar, aiming to use a “third-party vendor to mail thousands of unrequested voter registration applications will likely register non-citizens to vote.”
“Allowing non-citizens to vote is an obvious violation of Texas law,” Bettencourt added.
Who can vote in Texas?
You can register to vote in Texas if:
- You are a United States citizen;
- You are a resident of the county where you submit the application;
- The applicant must be at least 17 years and 10 months on the date of their registration and must be 18 years of age on the day of the election,
- The person is not a convicted felon but may be eligible if they have completed their sentence, probation, and parole, and
- The person has not been declared by a “court exercising probate jurisdiction to be either totally mentally incapacitated or partially mentally incapacitated without the right to vote.”
To register to vote, U.S. citizens can complete an application and submit it to their county election office 30 days before the upcoming election date.
They can also register through the Texas Department of Public Safety while renewing their state ID or driver’s license.
Once an application is submitted, a voter registration certificate, ie. the proof of registration, which contains the precinct where they live, will be mailed within 30 days.
Here are the people who cannot vote in the U.S.:
- Non-citizens, including permanent legal residents,
- Those convicted of a felony or serving time for crimes,
- Those who have a mental disability, and
- U.S. citizens residing in U.S. territories (they cannot vote for president in the general election).
Moreover, Texas has 100 different types of criminal offenses within its election code, but the major categories include:
- Illegal voting encompassing voter impersonation, non-citizens, non-residents, and felons,
- Mail Ballot fraud or vote harvesting, which includes gaining votes through deception, intimidation, or forgery or falsely claiming that an able-bodied person is disabled to make an application for a voter not qualified to vote by mail, and
- Voter Assistance fraud, in which campaign workers “insert themselves into the voting process” by approaching voters in parking lots of polling places and offering to assist them with voting.
For such fraud, penalties can range from misdemeanor offenses up to felonies, depending on the offense.
Is voter fraud common in Texas?
Paxton’s election fraud unit has a dwindling caseload but spends millions of dollars, according to Hearst Newspapers. During the 2022 fiscal year, the unit prosecuted four cases and spent the majority of its $2.3 million budget. In the next fiscal year, it closed two cases and was on track to spend $1 million. Voter fraud is also very rare in Texas, with 103 reported cases from 2005 to 2022, per the Heritage Foundation, ie, less than 1% of all ballots in 2020, with 11 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.
Despite how rare this fraud type is, Texas lawmakers passed regulations through Senate Bill 1 in 2021 on new ID requirements for voting by mail and how people can assist voters. Those offering assistance have to identify themselves and may be required to sign an oath. They cannot include employers or agencies of employers or unions. While anyone can share information about the voting procedure, only deputy voter registrars can accept registrations and give receipts. Or, one can register by applying themselves.
Elderly [65 years or older] and voters with disabilities can vote by mail. Applications for a ballot by mail do not require a witness unless the applicant cannot sign or requires assistance.
