THREAD: 50 Reasons Why Georgia's New Voting Law Really Is That Bad.

[yellowdogintexas]

28. Texas Election Code has not allowed drop boxes for a very long time

It would not have even come up if Austin and Houston had not attempted to open a second drop off point besides the County Elections Office (which was the only drop off point allowed in the Election Code). Before 2020, each county had one location and was only available during regular voting hours on election day, mostly to accomodate voters who did not get their ballot in the mail in time). If you took your ballot to the Elections Office, you had to show ID.

I wrote our Elections Administator about drop boxes (this was back in June and he sent me the Election Code and a copy of the changes in the code because of COIVD, The proclamation extended early voting by another week, allowed the Elections Office to accept dropped off VBM ballots for the entire voting period, moved the post primary runoff to a later date. ID still needed.

A very efficient drop off process was set up and it worked very well. It was essentially a drive through process so we probably could not do it that way again, but our folks are really clever and I expect a new system will be developed.

I don't know how our proposed bill will impact the things we did in 2020. It would be nice to have a good bullet point like the OP provided.

One thing that has been mentioned is doing away with voting centers and go back to voting in the home precinct, with every location having the same number of machines. I presume that addresses large voting locations with hundreds of machines would no longer be used. However, our major metropolitan counties and a number of others have a different voting center process, which allows a voter to go to any location in the county to vote on Election Day. If you work across the county and there is a precinct close to your workplace, you can stop and vote there instead of trying to beat traffic to get to your normal precinct by 7. As long as that remains in place,

Harris County just moved their VBM drop off point to an athletic arena which was also an Early Voting site with plenty of parking and easy access. I think the county office was downtown and hard to get to with no parking.