Opinion | Texas's voter suppression law got its first test. It worked like a charm. - The Washington Post

The latest phase of the Republican war on voting just got an early test in the primary election in Texas. If you believe in democracy, it was a horror show. If you’re a Republican, it was a smashing success.

Before we get to the shocking numbers, some context. The 1965 Voting Rights Act made Jim Crow-style voter suppression illegal everywhere in the country, so those who wanted to keep the “wrong” people from voting had to resort to piecemeal and limited tactics. They’d erect hurdles to voting that would fall more heavily on the other side’s supporters, but most of the time it would move the vote by a half-percentage point — enough to swing a close race but not sweeping disenfranchisement.

But today, two things have opened the door to much more ambitious voter suppression: an extended attack on voting rights by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a new GOP consensus that rejects the idea of universal participation, sees only Republican electoral wins as legitimate, and justifies almost any tactic to defeat liberalism.

In Texas, we see how it’s playing out. The Associated Press has released a new analysis covering 85 percent of the votes cast in the March 1 primary, the first held after Texas passed a bill imposing new rules and restrictions on voting, especially absentee voting. The results are stunning.

A small number of absentee ballots always get rejected by election authorities if a voter didn’t follow instructions, such as failing to sign their ballot. Typical rejection rates are around 1 or 2 percent; in the 2020 general election, the national rejection rate was 0.8 percent, while in the 2018 midterm election, it was 1.4 percent.

Most of the problem lay in the new verification method, which replaced signature-matching with the requirement to provide an ID number. Many voters apparently didn’t even realize they had to do so. (The spot to write your ID number was hidden under the envelope flap.) Even more disturbing, while you could provide a number of different IDs, the one you put on your ballot had to match the one you put on your ballot application.

So for instance, say you applied for an absentee ballot and supplied the last four digits of your Social Security number. But then months later, you fill out your ballot. You ask yourself: What number did I use? I can’t remember, so I’ll just put in my driver’s license number — the state knows who I am that way, right?

Because so many ballots were rejected, thousands of Republicans’ votes didn’t count in this election. But it appears substantially more votes from Democrats were trashed. The largest number came from heavily Democratic Harris County, where Houston is located: About 19 percent of mail ballots there were rejected.

By comparison, says the AP, “In the five counties won by Trump that had the most mail-in primary voters, a combined 2,006 mailed ballots were rejected, a rate of 10% of the total.”

You might expect Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the Republicans who wrote and passed this law to come out and say, “This was obviously a disaster. We have to do something to make sure all Texans get their votes counted.” But the most we’ve heard is assurances that people are getting used to the new requirements and things will be better next time. The governor’s office blamed local election officials for “erroneously interpreting the law.”

But the high rates of rejection are a feature, not a bug. The law is working just as it was supposed to. As Lina Hidalgo, the chief executive of Harris County, put it, “It’s a game designed to trick you at every turn.”

Yet it’s possible voters will in fact learn to navigate the requirements, or that because of extraordinary efforts by Democratic activists and the party, their partisans’ ballots will eventually be rejected at no higher rates than those of Republican voters. That has often been the case in the past: Republican voter suppression efforts are followed by a redoubling of Democratic organizing to overcome the suppression measures.

Should that happen, Republicans in the legislature will almost certainly get right to work on a new set of rules and requirements, designed once again to make voting harder for the groups that usually vote more for Democrats, such as Black people, young people, or city dwellers.

That’s a key feature of the current wave of GOP voter suppression laws: It’s an ongoing process of experimentation. Some measures will work as Republicans hope and will be kept in place, while others won’t and will be discarded.

Republicans will continually come up with new suppression methods, each one offered with the line that they want to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat,” as they said about the Texas law.

The results from the primary show what a lie that was. But don’t expect to hear it any less in the future. The Republican war on voting will never end, as long as there are Democrats with the temerity to believe they have an equal right to participate in their democracy.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/17/texas-republicans-voter-suppression-law/

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