And most of them are from Harris County.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
A House panel got a taste late Monday of the deep skepticism toward bringing online voter registration to Texas, skepticism coming from at least one population-rich part of the state.
It was mostly shared by a handful of Harris County officials who expressed concerns the practice could compromise voter privacy and lead to fraud at the ballot box. Some members of the House Elections Committee took note of the common thread, and Rep. Celia Israel, D-Austin, ended its meeting by cautioning her colleagues against letting the “negative comments of one county in the state of Texas rule the evening.”
The panel nonetheless heard praise for two pieces of legislation, House Bill 76 and House Bill 953, both with the same purpose: adding Texas to the list of 20 states that already let its citizens sign up to vote online. The committee left both bills pending late Monday.
Israel touted her HB-76 as a sign of the bipartisan support the idea enjoys under the dome, pointing out it has several dozen co-authors from both parties. Rep. Carol Alvarado, the Houston Democrat sponsoring HB-953, pitched it as a way of curbing the government waste that comes with paper registration, which is costlier and more labor-intensive than the online alternative.
“This bill is about efficient government. It’s about cutting wasteful spending,” said Alvarado, who has estimated Texas could save more than $11 million by ditching paper registration.
Alvarado had some back-up from several speakers including Samuel Derheimer of The Pew Charitable Trusts. He cited recent polling from the organization that showed more than 60 percent of Texans support online voter registration, and a third think the state already has it.
Among those from Harris County opposing the bills were Tax Assessor-Collector Mike Sullivan, Ed Johnson of the County Clerk’s Office and Alan Vera, chairman of the Ballot Security Committee of the Harris County GOP.
“Our current system works, and it works well,” said Sullivan, who like the two other speakers from Harris County expressed unease with the security of the state software that would handle registration.
Vera added that online sign-up could make it easier for voters to be impersonated at the polls, saying the “main fuel for voter fraud is registered voters who don’t show up to vote.”
See here for the background. Someone is going to have to explain to me what Alan Vera is talking about, because what he said makes no sense to me. To all those people who say they’re worried about fraud, I have to ask: Isn’t this the stated rationale for passing voter ID legislation? I mean, I could submit a registration request for Mickey Mouse, but unless someone shows up at the ballot box with one of the very few legally accepted forms of photo ID showing that he is in fact Mickey Mouse, what good would it do? I don’t see what the problem is here.
What about voting by mail? You don’t need a photo ID for that. That’s true. It’s also true that opponents of voter ID have made that exact same point about a billion times since the state GOP decided to push voter ID laws beginning in 2007. If you are concerned about the possibility of fraud via mail ballot, then you should discuss these concerns with your state legislators, since they most pointedly did not address any of those concerns in the voter ID law that they passed back in 2011. I’ll leave it to you to review the history of the voter ID fight to understand why the focus of that bill was entirely on in person voting and not at all on absentee voting.
But look, sooner or later we are going to transition from our current methods of voting, with the increasingly archaic and outdated machines we use now, to something more modern and in tune with the way people live their lives these days. Which is to say, we will do this via mobile technology. For sure, that introduces risks and security challenges. Believe me, I do that sort of thing for a living, I get that. If you think there aren’t glaring security holes in the systems we use now, you’ve got your head in the sand. We can choose to work with the technology of today and the emerging tech of tomorrow and meet those challenges head on, or we can pretend that what we’re doing now will be good enough forever and resist all attempts to change. I know which path I would prefer to take.