I have four things to say about this.
Bexar County rejected mail-in ballots at roughly ten times the rate it did before the passage of the state’s new voting law last year.
Before Senate Bill 1 took effect, with its host of changes and restrictions to voting in Texas, roughly 2% to 3% of mail-in ballots were rejected in local elections, Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen told the San Antonio Report.
In the March primary, as many as 22% have been rejected thus far, a figure she expects to increase once all the late, ineligible ballots are counted.
The county received a total of 18,336 mail-in ballots in the primary, and has had to reject 4,197 of them, most for “technical issues” associated with the new law, Callanen said.
One of the biggest issues was the new requirement that voters to provide, on both their vote-by-mail application and the ballot, their driver’s license number or Social Security number — critically, they must choose the same number for both.
If a voter wrote in different numbers, or a number not tied to them in the state’s system, the ballot was rejected. Some voters left that space blank, others chose the wrong number, or the state system had it wrong, Callanen said.
Making it even harder, the new portion of the form that asked for the voter’s Texas driver’s license number or the last for of their social was “in the smallest print possible,” Callanen said.
In order to fix, or “cure,” a ballot, the elections department sends it back through the post office to the voter to request changes. If there’s not enough time to mail it back and forth, the department tries to notify the voter by phone or email about the error, giving the voter a chance to come in person to the elections office to meet the curing deadline.
Corrected mail ballots are still arriving, she said, but “it’s too late. Now we can’t count them. … We had to have them back in our possession by Monday at 5 p.m.”
[…]
James Slattery, senior staff attorney on the Voting Rights Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the new voting provisions were designed to suppress the vote.
“Voting in person, or coming in person to the clerk’s office is obviously unavailable to people who are voting by mail because they’re outside of Texas, or because they have a disability and can’t leave their home easily,” he said.
Slattery called the curing options “byzantine,” defeating the entire purpose of mail-in voting. Also, many voters are unaware of the Secretary of State’s new website that explains the new processes, he said, as the state has done a poor job of voter outreach and education.
[…]
Voters have two more chances to get it right very soon. The primary runoff election on May 24 will include several county, state and federal races, including Bexar County judge, state House District 122, U.S. Congressional District 28, and State Board of Education, district 1.
Texas voters will also get the chance to reduce their property tax bills in the state’s constitutional amendment election on May 7.
That’s not much time to educate voters who may have had their mail-in ballots rejected, Callanen said.
“We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to reach out to those people to make sure that they get a ballot for May 7, that they get a ballot for May 24 without them being frustrated.”
1. The wording about ballots received and rejected in Bexar in the 2022 primaries is a bit confusing. To be clear, there were 14,180 total mail ballots cast, of which 9,809 were Democratic The historic election results on the Bexar County elections site doesn’t say how many mail ballots were cast in 2018, so I don’t have a good basis for comparison. In Harris County, there were 17,810 Democratic mail ballots cast and 11,064 Republican mail ballots, down from 22,695 and 24,500 in 2018, respectively. We don’t know how many ballots were rejected in Harris yet, but we know it was a lot early on. We need much finer data about this: How many ballot applications were rejected for each party, and how many later got fixed? How many mail ballots were then rejected for each party, and how many later got fixed? Of the people who never got a mail ballot or were not able to get their mail ballot counted, how many eventually voted in person? How many people who voted by mail in 2018 did so in 2022, how many of them voted in person instead, and how many didn’t vote at all? All of that data is available, we just need to know it.
2. What is there to be done about the people who are now apparently completely locked out of voting by mail? This story mentioned a woman who could not request one on behalf of her disabled son who can’t speak, because SB1 only allows you to request one for yourself. I was wondering about someone who gave a drivers license number when they registered to vote however many years ago but is now unable to drive and gave up their license, so they no longer have a DL number. Are they just screwed if they can’t vote in person? I feel like this may require litigation to determine, and we know how long that can take.
3. Let’s be clear, because this needs to be said over and over again, none of this bureaucratic bullshit in SB1 does a thing to make elections safer. It just makes it harder to vote by mail. The state’s lawyer admitted that was the idea in court. Republicans who believe in the big lie about the 2020 election will think what they want to, but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to.
4. All that said, unless we can get a win in court before November, which I would not count on, this is at this point a voter education issue. Everyone on the Democratic side needs to learn about the new law and help out the people they know who vote by mail to make sure their ballot is accepted. It’s harder now, and there’s no good reason for it, but this is where we are. If you are or know someone who voted by mail in 2020 and hopes to do so again, make sure you vote in both May elections, the runoff and the special. That’s your chance to practice for November.
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