Not to brag or anything, but no other state comes close to the levels of widespread voter suppression as my home state of Texas. But it is hard to recognize the amount of effort it takes to discourage so many voters without first analyzing how the Lone Star State does it so well. So all other states of America, take note, because this is how you suppress voters, Texas style.
As of this article’s writing, 37 states and the District of Columbia have a system for online voter registration, with Oklahoma soon to follow. Guess which state is one of the thirteen not on that list? Texas! In Texas, your registration application must be filled out by hand and mailed to your local County Voter Registrar (CVR). After your CVR receives it, you can enjoy twiddling your thumbs for thirty days before you are finally registered. If we forget the fact that physical mail is rapidly becoming a relic of the past and that thirty days to register is an unreasonable amount of time, this system does not seem too bad. But the above rules only do some of the work in making registration as hard as possible, the confusion about registration does the real heavy lifting. Even well-intentioned people and organizations can unknowingly engage in practices that invalidate a voter’s registration status. The fact that helping someone with their civic duty can land both them and you in trouble is part of what makes Texas voter suppression such a powerful force.
For example, Vote.org is an organization that provides free, easy-to-use tools for voter registration and information about how to vote in every state. Altogether, it’s an amazing service in the fight for voting rights; that is why it had to be stopped. Vote.org has a service that allows a potential voter to type out their information and receive a ready-to-print application with all the information filled in. However, after mailing in their applications, 8,000 applicants that used Vote.org found out that their registrations might be null and void. Because the registration forms included pictures of signatures instead of handwriting, the Texas Attorney General ruled that they may be challenged in court. All of these people were recommended to just register again, effectively making their efforts to register a huge waste of time.
Vote.org’s registration issues are not the only example of how helping people to register in Texas is futile. Say you want to help your community and hold a voter registration drive. You help your neighbors fill out the form and mail in their registrations for them. Congratulations! You’ve just committed a Class C Misdemeanor under Section 13.044 of Texas Electoral Code, punishable by up to a $500 fine! If you did this with the help of two or more friends, that’s a Class B Misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail and/or a $2,000 fine! Unless you are specially trained to register other voters as a Volunteer Deputy Registrar (VDR), assisting people with registration is a legal trap. Even VDRs only have jurisdiction within their own counties, so acting as one in another part of Texas is still just as illegal. This guarantees that no one who knows better helps anyone else register to vote, making registration an even greater challenge for those unfamiliar with the system.
But let’s move from registration to actual voting. Temporary early voting sites used to be a common thing in our state—not anymore. So-called “pop up” polling places were a convenient way for college students to vote while on campus, but possibly in response to the surge of young adult participation, they have been deemed illegal. This happens in the wake of a lawsuit by Prairie View A&M students alleging that their main voting site has voting times specifically designed to disadvantage them. Recent lawsuits regarding Texas’ electoral laws have not been successful though. On April 27, 2018, the 5th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Texas in a case against the state’s restrictive Voter ID laws.
Speaking of Voter ID laws, Texas’ seem awfully selective. Everyone active on this issue is keen to mention how Handgun Licenses are fine but College IDs are not accepted, which might reveal the type of voters Texas wants to incentivize. Also, four out of seven of those licenses require waiting in a three- to four-hour line at DPS (Texas’ DMV equivalent), which disadvantages voters who cannot afford to spend a weekday waiting in a line. In order to use one of the alternate forms of ID, there is a requirement to write down the specific reason you could not obtain a photo ID and sign. Voters without photo ID are often discouraged by this scare tactic and just refrain from voting.
Scare tactics are not even rare in terms of Texas Electoral Law. The punishment for voting illegally in Texas is incredibly severe—even if you had no idea you were committing the crime. Take Crystal Mason, a woman who years earlier was serving time for Tax Fraud. After voting in 2016, she was arrested and sentenced to five years for illegal voting, a second degree felony in Texas. Or what about Rosa Maria Ortega, a woman currently facing eight years and deportation for not knowing that permanent residents cannot vote? Prison sentences this long for lack of knowledge of what is a complicated voting system is unbelievably disproportionate. Keep in mind Mason’s vote was rejected before being counted, so she was prosecuted for voting illegally when she did not even vote! People with even the tiniest doubt that they are eligible to vote are discouraged by draconian laws and do not go out to the polls. At what point do these laws morph from “preventing people from voting illegally” to “preventing people from voting?” I would argue that Texas has already reached far beyond that point.
There are so many more suppression strategies Texas uses that I want to talk about, like how it has the most restrictive pre-registration laws in the country (so I am not yet registered!), or how if you don’t vote for too long you are stricken from the registration list, or how some voting machines just don’t work. These are covered in great detail by the Texas Civil Rights Project’s 2019 Election Protection Report.
The inspiration for this article was Georgetown Bipartisan Coalition’s (GBC) upcoming roundtable on Voter ID laws this Thursday, November 21. I am not affiliated with GBC, but I encourage you to go and learn more about this important topic. Voter Suppression is one of the biggest threats to our democracy and there is a clear need to protect the voting rights of all Americans.
Kelvin Doe (COL ’23) is the Managing Editor for Bipartisanship.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official or personal position of the Editorial Board, Contributors, or Business Staff of The Georgetown Review.
