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Still the only voter ID anyone should need

As Texas’ Tuesday voting registration deadline approaches, Nasser and a number of other deputy voter registrars, volunteers allowed to register voters on the spot, were out in force Saturday evening. While many states allow voters to register the day of an election, Texas voters must register one month before. The last day voters can register for the Nov. 6 election is Tuesday, since Monday is a federal holiday and the voter registrar office will be closed.

Voters who still need to register must visit their county voter registrar office to drop off a completed application or print and postmark an application to their county voter registrar by Tuesday. People can also register to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license.

As part of the Motor Voter Act, a federal judge has ordered Texas to allow voters to register online, but such a system will not be implemented in time for this midterm election because the order has been stayed while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appeals the decision. Nonetheless, the Texas voter rolls have grown to 15.6 million people, a new record that is 1.6 million higher than the last midterm election, according to Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos.

The last way to register is through a deputy voter registrar, which is why Nasser and a number of volunteers were standing outside the Festival Chicano.

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States occasionally remove voters from the rolls. Such removals are meant to target felons and the deceased. Texas, however, sometimes mistakenly purges voters by incorrectly presuming them dead, according to a report by New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. Sometimes other mistakes are made, such as when 1,700 voter registrations were mistakenly suspended this year due to what Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett called a software glitch.

Voters can check whether they are registered on the Texas Secretary of State site, although the webpage is not the official register of a voter’s registration, which is instead kept by county voter registration offices.

Basically, if you were registered before and you haven’t moved, you should still be registered. You can certainly check if you want to – in Harris County, I’d go to the Tax Assessor website and search there; go to your county’s elections administration page if you’re in a different county – but if you’re a previously registered voter, you should have gotten your updated registration card this January. If you did, you should be fine.

We’ll see how high the final numbers get. The last update from Harris County was over a month ago, and I expect that to be up. I think we might approach 16 million, but that’s a bit optimistic. Nate Cohn, who is doing one of those “live polls” of the Senate race here, says their model is projecting 6.3 million voters for turnout, which is right at 40%. That’s what we had in 2010, by the way, but with far fewer voters. It starts with registration, that much is for sure. The DMN has more.

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