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Opinion: Republicans engineered a democratic disaster in Texas
The Texas GOP did a good job of suppressing Democratic votes during the March 1 primary
Link to tweet
It’s a safe bet that Texans who voted by mail in the March 1 primary didn’t think state election officials would receive the ballots but then promptly toss them out. But that is exactly what happened to thousands of voters under the controversial state law that created new identification requirements. These would-be voters are among the first victims of the Republican Party’s campaign to restrict voting, the scandalous consequences of which are only now becoming visible.
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A Texas Tribune review found that Texas election officials rejected 18,742 mail-in ballots cast in 16 of the state’s 20 counties with the most registered voters. That translates into rejection rates from 6 percent to nearly 22 percent. An Associated Press survey found a 13 percent rejection rate across 187 Texas counties, concluding that the state trashed nearly 23,000 ballots. A rejection rate of more than 2 percent is generally considered high. Texas scrapped less than 1 percent of absentee ballots in 2020.
The Tribune found that the predominant issue was absentee voters’ failure to comply with strict new mail-in ballot voter-ID laws, which state negligence and technical problems made nearly impossible for many to meet. Perhaps these numbers will plummet as more people get used to the new rules. More likely, mail-in ballot users — many of them elderly or people with disabilities — will continue to struggle.....
It surely dawned on Republican state lawmakers that they also stood to benefit politically. True, new restrictions hit both Republican and Democratic voters to some extent, but disproportionately the latter. The Associated Press found that the rejection rate in Democratic-leaning counties in Texas was 15.1 percent — and 9.1 percent in Republican-leaning ones. Mr. Trump carried Texas in 2020 by a narrower margin than the state’s voting history might have led one to expect. Complex, unnecessary voting rules might help Republicans maintain their grip on the state, regardless of what voters actually think.
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A Texas Tribune review found that Texas election officials rejected 18,742 mail-in ballots cast in 16 of the state’s 20 counties with the most registered voters. That translates into rejection rates from 6 percent to nearly 22 percent. An Associated Press survey found a 13 percent rejection rate across 187 Texas counties, concluding that the state trashed nearly 23,000 ballots. A rejection rate of more than 2 percent is generally considered high. Texas scrapped less than 1 percent of absentee ballots in 2020.
The Tribune found that the predominant issue was absentee voters’ failure to comply with strict new mail-in ballot voter-ID laws, which state negligence and technical problems made nearly impossible for many to meet. Perhaps these numbers will plummet as more people get used to the new rules. More likely, mail-in ballot users — many of them elderly or people with disabilities — will continue to struggle.....
It surely dawned on Republican state lawmakers that they also stood to benefit politically. True, new restrictions hit both Republican and Democratic voters to some extent, but disproportionately the latter. The Associated Press found that the rejection rate in Democratic-leaning counties in Texas was 15.1 percent — and 9.1 percent in Republican-leaning ones. Mr. Trump carried Texas in 2020 by a narrower margin than the state’s voting history might have led one to expect. Complex, unnecessary voting rules might help Republicans maintain their grip on the state, regardless of what voters actually think.