2022 primary early voting, Day Four: Dan Patrick contributes to the mail ballot problem

This fucking guy, I swear to God.

Thousands of applications for mail-in ballots submitted by Texas voters have been delayed — and some voters may ultimately not receive ballots — because Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign instructed eligible voters to send requests for absentee ballots to the Texas secretary of state’s office instead of their local elections offices.

A mass mailing by Patrick went out to Republican voters across the state in January, ahead of the March primary, and included a two-page letter emblazoned with the seal of his office encouraging voters to submit the requests following “three easy steps.” The problem was the third step, which instructed voters to return the applications in an enclosed reply envelope that was addressed to the state.

The lieutenant governor’s campaign said it used the secretary of state’s address because “many Republican voters are rightly suspicious of Blue County election officials.”

“The decision to direct return mail to the Secretary of State (SOS), someone who is trusted and respected, gave voters an added layer of comfort,” Allen Blakemore, a campaign consultant for Patrick, wrote in an email.

But the campaign’s approach forced the secretary of state, which had a stated policy of rejecting applications erroneously sent its way, to sort and forward the Patrick-inspired forms to the counties where they should have been sent originally.

The delayed delivery could put voters’ requests for mail-in ballots at risk as counties continue to see higher-than-normal rejection rates of applications under new ID requirements enacted by Republicans last year. Any issues with defective applications must be resolved by Friday so voters can receive a mail-in ballot.

State workers have been forwarding the waylaid applications to respective counties, which this week were still receiving packages containing hundreds of misdirected applications.

The fiasco has further muddled the first election held since Patrick, as head of the state Senate, presided over last year’s passage of new laws tightening voting processes, including a measure making it a crime for local election officials to send out applications for mail-in ballots to people who did not request them.

“Everyone age 65 and older has earned the right to vote early by mail. As Republicans, we have fought to make it easier to vote while protecting election integrity, so we need to make sure we increase our turnout by taking full advantage of this convenient and secure voting option,” Patrick wrote in a letter dated Jan. 20 that was attached with the applications.

Though the letter contains the official state seal for the lieutenant governor, as allowed by law, the materials were labeled as being sent out by Patrick’s campaign and not at taxpayer expense.

[…]

The full scale of Patrick’s mailing efforts is unclear; his campaign did not answer a question about the reach of the mailings. But the secretary of state’s office previously told some county officials that it had received at least two pallets of applications, and some local election officials have indicated they were receiving hundreds of delayed applications.

“The SOS has always accepted ABBMs and quickly and efficiently routed them to the proper local offices,” Blakemore said, referring to applications for a ballot by mail. “We believe that this will ensure that Blue County election officials are more likely to properly handle our ABBMs when they know they are being watched and monitored by the SOS.”

In an email responding to questions about the misdirected applications, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state did not address the mailing campaign by the lieutenant governor.

“Generally speaking, we request that voters do not mail, fax, or email completed applications for Ballot by Mail to the Secretary of State Office,” wrote Sam Taylor, the spokesperson, noting that the office would forward applications to early voting clerks “as a courtesy to help the voter.”

“It is not the voter’s fault if a third party put the incorrect return address on an ABBM, so we want to ensure voters are not adversely affected by that,” Taylor said.

This appears to be a departure from the office’s previous stance on applications wrongly sent to its office. The secretary of state’s website previously warned voters against sending applications to its office, noting that “all applications received by this office will be rejected.” That language was removed from the website at the beginning of the month, according to a screenshot of the same page archived by the Wayback Machine.

Be the chaos you want to see in the world, I guess. It would serve a lot of people right if a ton of these folks did not get their mail ballots, or received them late enough to not be able to send them in on time, but we all know that Patrick would tout that as proof of the perfidy and incompetence of “blue county” administrators, and his brain-addled followers would believe him. It’s enough to make you want to rip a phone book in half. The Chron has more.

There’s only so much I can do about the toddler-like behavior of our Lt. Governor, and apologies to all the well-behaved toddlers out there who don’t deserve that analogy. Let’s go to the daily EV totals. Here are your Day Four early voting totals. The table for comparison:

Election    Mail   Early   Total
================================
2018 D     8,844  16,160  25,004
2018 R    12,530  16,053  28,583

2020 D    15,101  25,260  40,361
2020 R    16,428  24,785  41,313

2022 D     5,412  18,571  23,983
2022 R     3,419  23,599  27,018

As a reminder, 2018 final totals are here, and 2020 final totals are here. At this point, Republicans continued to lead in 2018 and nudged ahead in 2020 because of more mail ballots being returned. It all makes your head spin a little.

I should note that four days’ worth of early voting in both 2018 and 2020 took us through Friday of the first week in each case, because that’s when Presidents Day was those years. Because of that, and not wanting to compare weekend days to weekdays, I’ll put this on pause until Tuesday, when the calendar days finally match up to the early voting days. Try to cope in the meantime. And get out there and vote. I did my usual bike ride to the West End MultiService Center, which is both convenient to me and generally has no lines. They also had two scanners for the paper receipts, which makes me feel better for ensuring that this part of the process won’t bog down. How were things where you voted?

Related Posts:

• Fewer mail ballots rejected in November
• The rejected mail ballots of Bexar County
• Initial post-election wrapup