Texas
In September 2021, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed into law a draconian voter suppression law that, bans 24-hour and drive-thru voting, imposes new hurdles on mail-in ballots and empowers partisan poll watchers. Yesterday’s primary marked the first test of these new restrictions.
Predictably, voting rights were successfully suppressed. Start with mail in ballots, which are only available to a subset of Texans. The law, SB1, imposed additional pointless hurdles that must be jumped.
Texans who qualify to vote by mail felt the first consequences of the new law. It required them to include identification numbers both when applying for a mail-in ballot and again on the inside flap of the envelope they use to return the ballot – a process that tripped up many in recent weeks.
Those problems surfaced again at polling places on Tuesday. So if this is a dry run for November, the Republicans have been very successful in suppressing the vote.
This election represented the first time Delores Jones, 65, was eligible to vote by mail. It didn’t work out so well.
Jones said she applied for a mail-in ballot but never received one. Her neighbor, Ella Clark, 78, said she voted by mail but couldn’t tell whether her ballot had been received.
So, they both turned up to vote in person Tuesday.
“Not taking a chance,” Jones said, describing her decision. Mail-in voting in Texas this year, she added, seems “unreliable.”
Another Houston resident – Jimmie Williams, 87 – has voted by mail for a decade and was waiting this year for Harris County election officials to send him a mail-in ballot application so he could do so again.
But the new law bans election officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications. And by the time Williams realized that, it was too late, he said.
Criminal penalties for election workers had the expected deterrent effect:
During last year’s legislative sessions, Texas lawmakers created new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with poll watchers’ activities. The new rules were enacted after many Republican officials echoed former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, despite there being no evidence. Election officials and voting rights groups warned legislators that the new restrictions could have a potential chilling effect on election workers.
Several voting locations throughout the state were unable to open Tuesday during the primary election because of election staff shortages, causing some to open later in the day and others to shut down completely.
Locations in Dallas, Tarrant and Hidalgo counties reported missing either a Republican or Democratic Party election judge. These staff members are appointed by their respective parties to oversee polling sites.
If one of the parties’ judges is absent, the polling site cannot operate. That’s because by state law, no polling site can serve only one party, Tarrant County elections administrator Heider Garcia told The Texas Tribune.
Which brings us back to Balloon Juice efforts to combat voter suppression.
We introduced the Joint the Fight initiative with this post a few days ago and followed up with a post about the outreach we will be doing with activist organizations, state parties, and elected officials and their staff.
We intended to roll out the rest of the elements of Join the Fight in a series of posts over the course of this week But the gravity of the situation in Ukraine, the degree of interest and emotional engagement in what is happening – and what will be happening in the coming days – has understandably overshadowed engagement on other things.
So… change in plans for now. We think maybe it’s easier to focus on something not-Ukraine with an interactive conversation about the project, for maybe an hour or so. So we’re going to outline the basic elements of the rest of the project in this post, and invite you to join one of three project zooms next week. We’ll explain the project, and address your questions and suggestions.
For the folks who don’t want to zoom, all 3 sessions will be recorded so you can listen to them later if you like. AND we will follow up with regular BJ posts about the project once the situation in Ukraine is at least slightly less up in the air than it is now. Surely someone will find a “solution” to the Putin problem.
So.. back to Join the Fight. Join the Fight has created a database identifying the threats by state, focusing in particular on key swing states where voting rights are most embattled. It’s a different kind of fight and a different battles than in Ukraine, but they share one thing; it’s about holding the line on democracy.
We need your help.
We need those of you with research or organizational skills to help us track and continue to update key legislation and litigation threatening voting rights.
We need those of you who like to interact with other humans to help build relationship with other activist organizations.
Remember, we’re not just collecting information for information’s sake; we’re creating an interactive database, which when fully implemented will function as both a source of information and as a resource that identified opportunities for action.
Join the Fight will also have a social media component, offering opportunities to fight election misinformation in a coordinated fashion, primarily on Twitter and Instagram to begin with, but also perhaps on TikTok and Facebook down the line. You don’t have to be already social media savvy in order to join us – Momsense will be holding training sessions for the social media folks.
Interested in finding out more? We have four zooms scheduled, and if none of these times work for you, we can schedule another one to try to catch everyone.
– 8 pm blog (thinking of east coast peeps) MONDAY
– 10 pm blog time (thinking of west coast peeps) TUESDAY
– 1 pm blog time (weekday) WEDNESDAY
– 11 am blog time (weekend) SATURDAY
Click here to sign up to participate in the Join the Fight initiative. Election day is just 8 months away, and in some states, voting starts in just 7 months.
The right wing didn’t pause the battle to suppress voting rights because of the war in Ukraine; we can’t afford to wait either, even though it’s hard to y=focus on anything else.
laura
Am I the asshole for wanting to knock Gov Abott out of his chair and kick him in the head until the pink runs out? Asking for myself.
WaterGirl
@laura: You’ll have to get in line.
cmorenc
A plausibly intended effect of this requirement is that in blue-leaning areas (especially urban) the GOP can conveniently “forget” to appoint an election judge for polling sites, or mendaciously claim “inadvertent mixup” or that the assigned person had an unexpected “emergency”, and thereby suppress enough D votes to turn any close election. For example, the quoted incidents.
WaterGirl
Wow, Beto won with over 90% of the vote.
WaterGirl
@cmorenc: I guess you counteract that by having multiple people sign up to be election judges in each precint and staying on top of the confirmation paperwork?
Almost Retired
@cmorenc: Yeah, that’s a really good point. There’s so much opportunity for mischief in these scenarios — inconveniently located voting drop boxes, hyper-technical mail-in ballot rules, in-person voter intimidation, and further evil opportunities for interference and deterrence that I haven’t even thought of (but they have). Hopefully, the tracking function of the Join the Fight project will help spot the patterns for more focused action!
WaterGirl
@Almost Retired: Contact with activist organizations should tell us who is working to educate folks about the new bullshit rule changes. That’s how they still won in Wisconsin when they created all those last-minute rule changes. They contacted everyone and their brother and made sure they knew the rules.
There are people out there organizing and it will be good to make contact with them.
cmorenc
@WaterGirl: No, the issue is that the law still leaves open the possibility that none of the listed GOP poll judges show up in some heavily D districts. This is exactly what happened in the instances cited in the original post in this thread. While the law on its face would seem to be toward ensuring both the appearance and reality of fair elections, it seems written in a way that doesn’t prevent the perverse loophole of no R judge showing up, keeping the poll shut down at least during prime morning polling hours pending correction (which didn’t occur in the instances cited). What are the chances the Tx leg will adequately correct the loophole? I’m not holding my breath, at least until the D judge fails to show in enough predominately R polling districts.
WaterGirl
@cmorenc: I understand that. I am thinking that if election judge applicants continue to contact the powers that be for confirmation then there’s a lot less chance for the Rs to pull something shady and then shrug it off as an oversight.
Plus people can talk to the media about this stuff and pre-call it out, kind of like Biden did with Putin. That can take what might have been a viable, devious play out of the running.
The Rs are doing every shady thing possible, looking to see what they can get away with. It’s wrong and awful and horrifying, but I think we still need to try to plug as many holes as possible. Every vote is going to matter.
Spider-Dan
Seems like as written, all the GOP has to do is appoint exactly 1 judge each to the polling sites in various blue areas, then instruct them to stay home and those constituents are prohibited from voting. Or is there something I’m missing?
WaterGirl
@Spider-Dan: Dems could not appoint judges in read areas, right?
Spider-Dan
@WaterGirl: It seems like the closure is triggered by a duly-appointed judge being absent, not by the lack of an appointment. So in order to flip this, Dems would have to appoint their own judges in red districts and then no-show.
Setting aside the mutually assured destruction dynamics of such a strategy: given the nature of GOP voter distribution in rural areas, this would involve a lot more work for Democrats than the opposite does for Republicans.
MisterDancer
You are correct, I had this on my TODO and lost track of it due to Events. I have submitted both forms :)
MisterDancer
Agreed. Not perfect, yet: many people (much less media) aren’t even aware this is a requirement, which is part of how the GOP gets away with this crap.
“Drag ’em for filth” (into the sunlight) is a viable tactic, in these times. :)
WaterGirl
@Spider-Dan: Yeah, it’s definitely a problem. But maybe someone is already working on that, and maybe we can help get the word out. We won’t know until we start making connections
If there are folks working on that, we can be more hands to help (writing postcards or whatever) and we maybe some funds are needed to print literature or whatever. Lots of ways we can help. If some small group has a plan but needs $500 -$3,000 to implement it, if it’s a good cause we could probably raise that in a heartbeat.
WaterGirl
@MisterDancer: Glad to hear it!
It really is a struggle right now.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think Abbott’s legislative strategy of pitting neighbor against neighbor, like for abortion, will end up costing him his reelection.
Almost Retired
@WaterGirl: Yup, this will be a great way for those of us comfortably ensconced in Blue cities to get involved in the voting rights fight in the swing states.
WaterGirl
@debbie: I certainly hope you are right. I still firmly believe that we have no idea what is going to happen in November. As far as I’m concerned there are too many wild cards this time for any of the usual predictors to be valid.
So we fight like hell on every front, as strategically as possible. The name of the game is no regrets.
Peale
So basically the gop could fail to send judges to Houston and Dallas and no one could vote.
catclub
@cmorenc:
get lots of democrats to sign up for the GOP judge spots.
catclub
@Peale: see my post below yours
H.E.Wolf
[off-topic]
@MisterDancer: As a front-pager, do you have a Balloon Juice email address yet? Wanted to send you a scan of a sample GOTV postcard, per your comment a while ago that you were interested in the group I’ve been writing with.
WaterGirl
@H.E.Wolf: He does! His nym at balloon-juice.com
Just substitute MisterDancer for WaterGirl and you are golden.
I am certain that I tested it when I added MisterDancer to wordpress, email, etc but if it doesn’t work let me know right away.
Spider-Dan
@catclub: The spots are appointed by the Texas GOP.
WaterGirl
@Spider-Dan: Why/how is it that all the decisions about election judges are made by a Repubican?
RaflW
I’m interested in the social media component. I dipped my toe into the first iteration here (because of my past ties with Texas) but found that I lack the extraversion to do calling or even staying tuned in during zooms. (Pandemic mood swings playing some role for me, too)
That said, I can be feisty on Twitter. May or may not be what this group & concept are about. I think the BF and I are also going to tend towards things we can do about Wisconsin, given our proximity (and BFs mom is out kicking butt in Menomonee Falls, putting us in the hot seat to do more!).
Anyway, long way ’round of saying thanks, WaterGirl, for keeping some of our divided attention on holding onto the fragile democracy we still mostly sorta have here!!
WaterGirl
@RaflW: Are you up for one zoom to get a better fee for what we are up to? If so, click the link in the post and pick a zoom next week.
piratedan
and just to show how elegant the grift can be, what’s to stop the GOP from sending impersonators to act as Dem poll watchers/workers in heavily GOP Areas? Their voters get counted and if the Dems attempt to reciprocate, they’re called out for not being compassionate enough. Implausible? sure, so is not doing anything to improve the power grid.
Mary G
Since it’s an open thread let me say my mom was from Texas and based on my limited connections they are some thick-headed tribal people who felt Tex-Mex food was vastly better than CA burritos and Six Flags way better than Disneyland. So your work is cut out for you, but I’m sure it can be done.
I’d help too, but I fell twice in two evenings and despite perfect vitals they found congestive heart failure, plus a huge UTI l had ignored because of covid. I have IVs. I have sensors. Attached all over my arms and torso. Probably going home Friday.
Got to listen to some Fox and Friends, a long prayer session, and a guy training volunteers to talk young women out of having abortions. Did you know your soul is like a McDonald’s mocha drink? God is the plastic lid, your pureness is the whipped cream, the chocolate is the temptation and the stuff at the bottom is your baby drowning in your deepest, darkness dreams of sin.
MomSense
@RaflW:
I like the sound of feisty on Twitter. Those of us who already use Twitter can help people create accounts and learn how to get started. For some of us we can work on how best to amplify the Jan 6 committee’s work, help local candidates and issues, and engage with media. Lots to do and I think jackals will be so good at it.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I am sorry to hear all that. I wonder if maybe your anxiety was actually trying to help you?
jnfr
Trying to figure out what I’ll have energy for this year. I already have some election commitments.
I admire all the organizational work you’ve put in, and I’ll keep monitoring for concrete stuff beyond donations and going wild on Twitter :)
Chris T.
@cmorenc: Yes, but two can play at that game. Unfortunately, if one player expects the other player to pull these kinds of shenanigans, the other player must pull them in protective correction. The result is a race to the bottom in which nobody can vote anywhere.
MomSense
@Mary G:
I’m so sorry you are going through this. Try and rest as much as you can. I’m rooting for you!!
sab
@WaterGirl: Beacause Democrats do not knee jerk all elections.
sab
@Mary G: I have heart problems. It is remarkable how much heart problems quietly sap your energy.
Haven’t posted before about this, but I think of you every day when I wake up and my ticker works. I akways hope yours does also.