Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Easier to vote and harder to cheat: that was the refrain Texas heard from Republican state lawmakers when they passed their sweeping election bill last year.
Yet for some of the state’s most vulnerable voters, casting a ballot in the 2022 primary election has been anything but easy, and state officials are to blame. In Texas, only citizens age 65 or older and disabled or absentee voters in certain circumstances are allowed to vote by mail.
One of the new requirements this year is that citizens who vote by mail provide an identification number when they apply for a ballot and when they fill out the ballot itself. The ID required is a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, and the number must match the ID that the person used to register to vote.
We supported this provision last year on account that it would lessen the state’s reliance on signature matching, an antiquated and unreliable form of identity verification. But it was also clear that this new rule could result in complications for a fraction of voters. The state indicated that as of late December, about 702,000 voters had only one of the two forms of ID on file while nearly 107,000 people had neither.
Now news outlets are reporting that some large Texas counties are rejecting up to 40% of the mail-in ballots they’ve received because of ID problems. In Dallas County, more than a quarter of ballots received as of mid-February had been rejected, with the county returning dozens of rejected ballots to allow voters to correct issues. The reasons for those ballot rejections were not specified.
County elections administrators across Texas faced similar problems with mail-in ballot applications.
The secretary of state’s office has been working to backfill a state database to include both ID numbers for voters, according to the Texas Tribune. But some local elections officials told the Tribune in January that they were not aware that the state voter database was being updated with this information or that the state data was not syncing up with local databases.
Officials also told the Tribune they were worried that voter outreach efforts could run afoul of the new state law, which makes it a state jail felony for an elections official to “solicit” the submission of a mail-in ballot from a voter who has not requested one.
That provision in the state law appears to have been a reaction to a plan in Harris County before the 2020 general election to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in the county, regardless of whether they qualified. That was a misguided idea.
But the office of the secretary of state should make it clear to local officials that they won’t get in trouble for launching education campaigns to inform the general public about the new voting rules. In fact, the secretary of state’s office should lead in educating the public.
— The Dallas Morning News