The Chron notes the latest milestone.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
For the first time in history, Texas has topped 16 million registered voters and is adding voters faster than its population grows heading into the 2020 presidential election.
With the voter registration deadline for the March 3 primaries just two weeks away, the state is already on the brink of having 2 million more registered voters than it did just four years ago when President Donald Trump was first elected.
“What you’re seeing is a true transformation of the Texas electorate,” said Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt, a voter advocacy group focused on registering young Latino voters and getting them involved in politics.
He said despite all the barriers Texas has put in place to depress voter registration and voter turnout, groups like his are drawing younger and more diverse voters, which is making the politics of Texas more reflective of its demographics — about 40 percent of the state’s population is Latino, census data shows.
Since 2017, the population in Texas has grown by about 5 percent. But the state’s voter registration has grown about 8 percent during that period. The increase is even more dramatic in urban areas such as Harris County, the state’s most populous county. While Harris County’s population has grown an estimated 4 percent since 2014, its voter registration has jumped 14 percent.
In Bexar County the population has grown an estimated 11 percent since 2014, while the voter registration has jumped 19 percent.
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While Texas doesn’t require voters to register by party, Texas Democratic Party officials say their internal data shows that the voter gains are largely due to voters that skew their way — younger and more diverse.
Cliff Walker, Deputy Executive Director of the Texas Democratic Party, said as the state has looked more competitive with each election, that in turn has drawn even more younger and diverse voters to sign up, which then makes the state still more competitive. In other words, the success begets more success, he said.
See here for the background. The correlation with the growth in urban voter registration is no surprise. I’ve tracked the Harris County numbers before, and while the surge in statewide voter registration lags a bit behind, it’s all happened in the last couple of years. Which, not coincidentally, is when Democrats and Dem-aligned groups have made voter registration a priority and really put a bunch of resources into it. That latter bit is key, because registering voters in Texas is even harder than you thought.
In 2013, former campaign operatives who worked with President Barack Obama launched a group called Battleground Texas. The mission was to more aggressively register voters in Texas, a place that has a history of making it difficult to register to vote. That was a tall task, given a 2011 Texas law that significantly toughened voter registration rules to require people wanting to register voters to go through county-specific voter registrar training; the law also blocked non-Texans from joining that work.
So to register voters statewide, a volunteer would be forced to attend 254 different trainings. Texas also does not accept online voter registration applications — the paperwork must include a handwritten signature, and that signature cannot be a copy, digital signature or photo of a signature.
But slowly Battleground Texas and other groups started to make headway. Other groups have joined the cause, with Jolt, The Lone Star Project and Be One Texas among them.
This strategy also includes litigation, over things like the “motor voter” law and electronic signatures, but those won’t yield any fruit for this election. In a sane world, voter registration would be easy, but this is Texas. We have to do it the hard way. Put fixing all this on the agenda for when Dems finally control state government.
One more thing, which I have discussed but which I don’t see get mentioned in other stories, is that boosting registration totals is by itself a turnout program. I’ll say again, turnout as a percentage of registered voters was down in Harris County in 2016 compared to 2008, but because there were so many more registered voters the total number of folks who showed up increased. Statewide turnout in 2016 was 59.39%, for 8,969,226 total voters. Taking the 16,106,984 number we have now – and remember, that will go up some more before the primary deadline – and at the same 59.39% turnout rate you get 9,565,937 voters, or 600K more. If the 18 million goal is reached, that puts turnout at 10.7 million if the rate is the same. Now of course there’s no guarantee of reaching the same rate – as was the case in Harris County, the statewide turnout rate in 2008 (59.50%) was higher than it was in 2016 – my point is that you can catch more fish with a bigger net. Add in a real turnout push on top of that, and who knows what can happen. It all starts with getting more people registered.
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