The Texas Election Bill Contains a New Obstacle to Voting That Almost No One Is Talking About
There’s a problem buried inside Texas’s latest election bill, and it’s not one of the headline-grabbing restrictions that have torn the Legislature apart during the special session. Nonetheless, it could disenfranchise a significant number of the state’s voters.
Amid all the fighting, most lawmakers have apparently overlooked a provision that would force counties to automatically reject some mail-in ballot applications. Here’s why: The Republican-authored legislation would require voters to submit either their driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number when applying to vote by mail. That number would then be cross-checked with the state’s voter-registration database. Most applicants would be fine, because almost 90 percent of all registered Texas voters have both their Social Security number and driver’s license number in the database. However, 1.9 million voters—about 11 percent of the total—have only one of the two numbers on file with the state.
During late-night testimony to a committee of the Texas House on July 10, Chris Davis, the elections administrator for Williamson County, explained that most of the voters with only one number on file wouldn’t remember which number they filed, often many years earlier, and would have to guess. “You have a 50 percent chance of the voter guessing wrong,” said Davis. Guess wrong and your application would be rejected, even if it’s been twenty years since you used your Social Security or driver’s license number to register to vote. “I challenge any person on the committee: do you remember what you filled out when you got your voter registration? I certainly don’t. And I’m in the business of this. And if [the numbers] don’t match, we’re rejecting.”
Some 11 percent of Texas voters cast their ballots by mail in 2020, so if that percentage held up in future elections, 209,000 of the 1.9 million voters with only one ID number on file with the state would be requesting mail-in ballots. If most of those voters are guessing which ID number to cite on their application, and they have a 50 percent chance of guessing correctly, then 104,500 of them would have their applications rejected. Some of these voters might find other ways to vote, including in person. But some with serious disabilities, or those who have to be out of state during the period when polls are open, would be out of luck.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-election-bill-contains-new-voting-obstacle/
