“The concern is that there are too many hurdles for voters to go through,” said Leah Shah, director of communications for Harris County elections.
Harris County, which encompasses Houston and surrounding areas and is the state’s most populous county, has seen an “unprecedented” rejection rate, according to Shah, who said similar issues have been reported in other counties.
Of the 7,243 mail ballots that Harris County has received so far, just over 2,700 — or 38 percent — were flagged specifically because there was no ID. Likewise, the county’s rate of rejection for mail ballot applications, 14 percent, is more than double the 6 percent rate seen in the 2018 primary.
Texas’s controversial new law, Senate Bill 1, is part of a raft of GOP-crafted legislation passed in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The bill’s backers contend the new restrictions are needed to ensure election integrity, but critics say the measure is meant to suppress Democratic votes in upcoming races.
Under S.B. 1, mail-in voters are required to provide either a Texas driver's license number, a Texas ID number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. That number, in turn, must match the number in a voter’s registration file.
Shah cited a variety of reasons why mail-in voters might fail to comply with the new ID requirement: Those accustomed to avoiding disclosure of personal information through the mail might find the new requirement confusing; the fine print may be easily overlooked; and the “rushed” process has meant little time to get voters up to speed on the new changes.
For now, Harris County elections officials are doing what they can to help rejected mail voters remedy their ballots — placing phone calls to explain the steps and returning ballots with requirements highlighted.
But according to Shah, part of the concern is that we “can't assume that people have the time to dedicate to making the corrections.”
Make no mistake about it. These efforts are being consciously made for the specific purpose of suppressing Democrat votes. How do we know this? Well, because Republicans have at various times admitted it.
In Florida, both the state’s former Republican Party chairman, Jim Greer, and its former Republican governor, Charlie Crist, told The Palm Beach Post in 2012 that the state’s voter ID law was devised to suppress Democratic votes. Mr. Greer told The Post: “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only,” he said. Consultants told him “we’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,” he said. He added, “They never came in to see me and tell me we had a fraud issue. It’s all a marketing ploy.”
A senior vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, Steve Baas, had a thought. “Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?” he wrote in an email on April 6, 2011 to conservative strategists. “I obviously think we should.” Scott Jensen, a Republican political tactician and former speaker of the State Assembly, responded within minutes. “Yes. Anything fishy should be highlighted,” he wrote. “Stories should be solicited by talk radio hosts.”
Representative Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin, predicted in a television interview that the state’s photo ID law would weaken the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the state in November’s election.
North Carolina publicly stated in court that the reason they stopped Sunday voting was that counties with Sunday voting were disproportionately black, and blacks disproportionately vote Democrat. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) on voter suppression: "And then they remind me, that there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea." Republican Rep. John Kavanagh of Arizona said "everybody shouldn’t be voting...we have to look at the quality of votes."
“What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing. “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions.
While Abrams and Kemp were in a statistical tie during the gubernatorial election in 2018, more than 53,000 Georgia voter registrations were put on hold under the state’s new “exact match” standard, which Kemp championed through the Georgia legislature in 2017. The report estimated that 80 percent of the pending applications belong to people of color. Kemp pushed for a law that would help him win the Governorship the next year. Kemp was acting Georgia Secretary of State which put him in complete charge of the election he was running to win. If that isn't a brazen conflict of interest then I don't know what it.
Georgia House Speaker David Ralston is worried that sending every voter an absentee ballot request form could increase turnout ― and thus hurt Republicans. "This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia."
Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Florida Republicans, stated he knew targeting Democrats was the goal. “In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.
Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign: "traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places."
Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly: "The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama's ground game. "
Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their voter identification law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That summer, at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund conceded that Democrats had a point about the GOP’s focus on voter ID, as opposed to those measures—such as absentee balloting—that are vulnerable to tampering. “I think it is a fair argument of some liberals that there are some people who emphasize the voter ID part more than the absentee ballot part because supposedly Republicans like absentee ballots more and they don’t want to restrict that,” he said.
After the election, former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer told The Palm Beach Post that the explicit goal of the state’s voter-ID law was Democratic suppression. “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told the Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only ... ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’” he said. Indeed, the Florida Republican Party imposed a host of policies, from longer ballots to fewer precincts in minority areas, meant to discourage voting. And it worked. According to one study, as many as 49,000 people were discouraged from voting in November 2012 as a result of long lines and other obstacles.
Also in Wisconsin, Todd Allbaugh, 46, a staff aide to a Republican state legislator, attributed his decision to quit his job in 2015 and leave the party to what he witnessed at a Republican caucus meeting. He wrote on Facebook: "I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. Think about that for a minute. Elected officials planning and happy to help deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power."
In Pennsylvania, the state Republican Party chairman, Robert Gleason, told an interviewer that the state’s voter ID law “had helped a bit” in lowering President Obama’s margin of victory over the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the state in 2012.
Scott Tranter, a Republican political consultant, said during the 2012 election that voter ID laws were part of his campaign tool kit.
Don Yelton, a North Carolina Republican Party county precinct chairman, told an interviewer for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in 2013 that the state’s voter ID law would “kick the Democrats in the butt.” Mr. Yelton later resigned; the party disavowed his statements.