I’m kind of fascinated by this.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
On election day last month, 29-year-old Shannah Becker from Pasadena showed up at a polling location to cast her ballot, but was turned away.
Although she had submitted her voter registration application in early October, she mailed it in late, one day past the Oct. 7 deadline.
“I definitely felt very disappointed,” Becker said. “And I asked if there was anything else I could do to be able to vote still and they just said, ‘Unfortunately not.’ I feel like a lot of people didn’t really realize the deadline until it was too close, or even past.”
Becker was among the 21,026 Harris County residents who registered after the deadline, making them ineligible to vote in the Nov. 5 presidential election. According to the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office, 3,701 of those registrations were recorded on Election Day.
Had they been able to cast ballots, those newly registered voters could have affected the results of 13 countywide races in which the winning margin was under 21,000 votes.
The impact to the countywide turnout rate, however, would not have been as large: overall Harris County turnout would have increased by less than a percentage point if all of those registrants had been able to vote.
Texas is one of 10 states that has a voter registration deadline of 30 days before an election. In 23 states, including California and Wyoming, residents can register and vote on the same day. Twenty of those states allow residents to register on Election Day.
[…]
“A huge chunk of voter suppression in Texas happens before anybody ever reaches the ballot box because our voter registration systems are so out of date and terrible,” said Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit that supports online voter registration, election day registration, automatic registration and pre-registration for 17-year-olds.
French said each year since 2018, she has had to break the news to a person that they could not vote in the upcoming election because they registered past the 30-day deadline.
“The only reason that that 30-day deadline makes any sense is to give counties time to input the data and physically type in all the voter registrations,” French said. “We did that to ourselves by having paper voter registration instead of online voter registration.”
I regularly see stories during the year about how many new voters have registered since whatever previous date. I don’t think I’d ever seen reporting on how many people registered after the 30-days-before-Election-Day deadline, so kudos to the Houston Landing for that. I feel bad for people like Shannah Becker who perhaps could have known better but definitely deserved better. We do make it needlessly hard to register, and it does dampen turnout as a result. As with so many other things, that’s not going to change as long as the current regime is in power, so we have to work with what we’ve got.
Ms. Becker’s registration will be good through the end of 2025, so she can vote in next year’s Pasadena elections and the whiny sore loser judicial election do-over (appeal pending) if she wants. If she moves, she’ll need to update her registration if she wants to vote in the 2026 gubernatorial race. I hope someone makes sure she knows this, so she won’t miss out the next time.
Texas isn’t alone, and ironically several states known for being consistently red (Iowa, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho) are among those that have instituted same-day, including Election Day, voter registration.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/same-day-voter-registration
Over 21,000? Good grief, that’s a lot of people asleep at the wheel. I’m also annoyed that college IDs aren’t accepted for registration while gin licenses are.
Gun, sorry