I’ve tried and failed to come up with a better post title than that for this.
After two years of fears of electoral dysfunction and violence, voting rights advocates breathed bated sighs of relief this week as Texas finished a relatively calm midterm election cycle.
“It was a little bit better than I thought, but I also had very low expectations,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the voting rights group Common Cause Texas. “We were really concerned about violence at the polls, and most of that was pretty limited.”
But he’s not celebrating.
Citing thousands of voter complaints received throughout the midterm cycle, Common Cause and other voter advocacy groups want the Texas Legislature to bolster voter protection and education measures and revisit recently passed laws that empowered partisan poll watchers.
The complaints ranged from long lines, malfunctioning machines and delayed poll site openings to harassment, intimidation, threats and misinformation. Common Cause received at least 3,000 such complaints on its tipline, Gutierrez said, and most of the harassment, misinformation and intimidation allegations came from voters of color, sparking fears that there were targeted efforts to quell election turnout in 2022 and future contests.
Other voting rights groups said this week that they saw a similar number of complaints. They warned that even isolated incidents can have reverberating effects on voter confidence or exacerbate political tensions that are already at dangerous levels.
“It could be chilling to thousands and thousands of voters,” said Emily Eby, senior election protection attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “We can’t underestimate the impact of fear entering the voting equation.”
The 2022 cycle was the first major electoral contest since the passage of Senate Bill 1, a package of voting laws that the Texas Legislature pursued in part due to unfounded claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The legislation tightened mail-in voter identification requirements, banned drive-thru and 24-hour voting and curtailed early-voting hours.
It also enhanced partisan poll watchers’ access to polling places, giving them “free movement” at sites and allowing for misdemeanor charges to be pursued against election officials accused of obstructing them “in a manner that would make observation not reasonably effective.”
Voting and civil rights groups warned at the time that the new law — coupled with rising election denialism — would disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color in Texas. In 2020, Texas had the most Black eligible voters in the nation, the second-largest number of Hispanic eligible voters and the third-largest number of Asian eligible voters, according to Pew Research Center. Texas has routinely ranked among the nation’s most restrictive for voting due to, among other things, its tight rules on mail-in and absentee ballots. This year, Texas ranked 46th out of 50 states for ease of voting, according to the Election Law Journal’s annual Cost of Voting Index.
I drafted this right after the election and am just running it now. You can read the rest, I don’t have much to add. I was pleasantly surprised that early voting went as smoothly as it did, and while there were some polling place issues in Harris County they were snafus and not the result of intimidation or sabotage, despite the risible efforts to nullify the results. There were some issues with poll watchers elsewhere in the state but I didn’t hear of anything here. Nationally, at least at this very minute, there seems to be a moment of reckoning for election denialism, though given the results here there’s no reason to believe any Texas Republican has had anything remotely close to a change of heart on that score. I too am glad we made it through this election without anything horrible happening, but I don’t know that I’m more optimistic about 2024. Ask me again later, I sure hope I can give a different answer.