As the Texas Secretary of State hustles to train and equip county election officials to implement new ID requirement for absentee voters that is creating confusion across the state, Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir offered advice to voters.
“The best thing to do when faced with voter suppression — and my friends, this is what voter suppression looks like — the best thing to defeat it is to go vote,” DeBeauvoir, a Democrat, said at a news conference Tuesday. “The best thing to do is fight back.”
The law, passed by the state’s Republican majority last year and in effect as of Dec. 2, added requirements for voters to include a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number. The new law also required that voters be allowed to correct mistakes on their mail ballot applications with the click of a button using an online state system.
But with less than a month left for voters to request mail ballots ahead of the Feb. 18 deadline for the March 1 primaries, mail ballot applications are being rejected by the hundreds, voters are confused about what information to include with their applications, and counties have not yet received training on how to use the online system to fix them. The state will hold its first webinar on the ballot tracker site Thursday.
Meanwhile, incomplete applications continue to pour in — over 25 percent of them delivered to DeBeauvoir’s office so far are insufficient. Some have no ID number. Others have an ID number that doesn’t match what the county has on file. Others are using old applications for ballots by mail, which do not comply with SB 1 and also must be rejected; the new application came out Dec. 3.
“Legislators were warned that this would happen, that voters would be confused, that this would create havoc among our voters,” said Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, referring to testimony groups like hers gave during the legislative session. “There just has not been enough time to do the voter education needed by the Secretary of State’s office to counties or counties to the voters.”
Just two states, Alabama and Wisconsin, had ID requirements in 2020 for voters requesting a mailed ballot, but last year, Republicans in nearly a dozen states offered up bills limiting the method after its heyday during the pandemic. Texas and at least three other states enacted them: Arkansas, Florida and Georgia, according to Voting Rights Lab, which advocates for expanded voter access.
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