Texas' new voting laws are working as intended (unfortunately)

[LetMyPeopleVote]

According to Paul Begala, Texas is not a red state http://www.collindemocrats.org/texas-isnt-a-red-state-its-a-non-voting-state/

“Texas isn’t a Red State, it’s a non-voting state”
~ Paul Begala @ BattlegroundTX (#BGTX) fundraiser, Austin, Texas – Jun 22, 2013

There are clear demographic trends that show that Texas will flip to blue in the near future. The GOP has been fighting these efforts for a while. The Texas voter id law worked great during the one cycle when it was fully in effect where Greg got more votes than Rick Perry but Wendy Davis got far fewer votes than Bill White.

The judge in the Texas voter id trial found that the Texas voter id law would affect between 600,000 registered and 1.4 million eligible voters. The above chart is consistent with this finding. Chad Dunn got this law gutted and now the GOP is resorting to other tactics that are also working.

Link to tweet

Texas’ new voting system was put to the test during recent statewide primaries, and it’s tough to be satisfied with the results. An analysis by The Associated Press found that the Lone Star State, thanks to Republican-imposed restrictions, threw out mail-in votes “at an abnormally high rate.”

Republicans promised new layers of voting rules would make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.” But the final numbers recorded by AP lay bare the glaring gulf between that objective and the obstacles, frustration and tens of thousands of uncounted votes resulting from tighter restrictions and rushed implementation.

Election experts told the AP it’s unusual for 2 percent of ballots to be rejected in any given election. During Texas’ recent primaries, however, roughly 13 percent of mail ballots “were discarded and uncounted across 187 counties.”.....

Postscript: In case this isn’t obvious, had Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court left the Voting Rights Act intact, Texas’ voting restrictions wouldn’t exist right now. What’s more, if senators were able to vote up or down on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, federal officials would be able to intervene in Texas, but a GOP filibuster is blocking action on the issue.

We are fighting GOP voter suppression. I suspect that more Democrats will vote in person this cycle than in 2020 to get around this problem. I was eligible to vote by mail in both 2020 and 2022 but I will be voting in person. We had poll watchers out in the primary which is normally not needed and the party will be busy in the general election

[Chainfire]

1. I don't care how Plano elects it's city commissioners, but we all know

That there should be standard procedures for elections involving who goes to Washington to make laws that affect us all. If what happened in Texas stayed in Texas, I wouldn't care. It the SC was what they are supposed to be, that issue would be addressed in no uncertain terms. National elections, national standards. States rights issues are bogus, that ship sailed in 1865. We can be either the United Sates or separate states, not both.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. In Texas, thousands of mail ballots were rejected following new ID requirements

Link to tweet

Thousands of Texas voters had their mail ballots rejected in this month's primary, after the state's controversial new voting law created additional ID requirements.

Local election officials say the new identification requirements as a result of the Republican-backed law tripped up many eligible voters in the March 1 primary.

An Associated Press analysis released Wednesday afternoon found that a total of nearly 23,000 mail ballots were rejected across the majority of Texas' counties.

Perhaps most notably, in Harris County — home to Houston, and the state's most populous county — officials said they rejected a whopping 19% percent of the mail ballots they received, or 6,888 mail ballots in total.

During the primary election in 2018, the county had only rejected 135 mail ballots out of more than 48,000, election officials said in a statement. That's less than 0.3%.