Texas GOP’s new voting law sparks rejections, confusion ahead of primaries

Election officials in Texas are struggling to implement new provisions in the state’s voting laws ahead of the March 1 primaries — a warning sign for states that participated in the GOP push to rewrite voting rules after former President Donald Trump’s defeat.

Hang-ups include putting new ID requirements in place and navigating stricter rules about how to distribute voter registration and absentee ballot forms. The issues have frustrated and confused the people in charge of managing the vote in Texas, election officials from four counties said in interviews.

Among the consequences: An unusually high number of applications to vote by mail were rejected ahead of the primary, officials said.

The pileup of issues stem from the nationally watched fight over a new voting law last summer, which Democrats sought to block by twice breaking quorum and even absconding to Washington, D.C., for a time. The legislation eventually passed and was signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after several Democratic lawmakers returned to Austin, but the breaks delayed the bill’s enactment by several months.

Now, the hurried process to implement the law highlights some of the unintended effects of the red state push to change voting bills over the last year. Managing changes to election procedures often falls to county officials on tight budgets with little time — and GOP legislators in numerous states are still considering new election bills this year, months before their 2022 primaries.

An election usually takes at least half a year to plan, said Isabel Longoria, the elections administrator in Harris County — the state’s largest county, anchored by Houston. But she said the process of learning how to implement changes from SB 1 had been rushed from the start. Republicans pushed the bill as an anti-fraud measure amid Trump's conspiracy theories about the 2020 results, but opponents said it created greater obstacles for marginalized voters to cast their ballots. It was signed into law Sept. 7, and the first official advisory from elections officials didn’t come for months.

“What has shocked me is maybe the lack of foresight on what it takes to implement the laws and the impact it has immediately on voters,” Longoria said. “I think legislators, perhaps at the state level, not being as intimate with the procedure think it’s just a snap of your fingers to implement.”

The secretary of state, John B. Scott, and other top elections administrators have released advisories on a rolling basis with details on the updated voting process and held regular webinars to give instructions and answer questions about new provisions.

Longoria said her office — which is preparing for six local, state and federal elections in six months — had gotten guidance “sometimes the day of deadlines, or two days before,” and there were still policies they haven’t received four weeks from primary day, like checklists for opening and closing procedures.

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, said the legislative breaks and delays in passing the bill this summer created a “massive undertaking” for the office as they created new guidelines, trainings and forms.

“It’s a critical time crunch,” Taylor said. Advisories "have to be put out on a rolling basis — if we waited until every single thing was done, then they would be getting guidance, like, this week.”

Texas officials have had to update hundreds of forms in English, Spanish and other languages to convey heightened charges for fraudulently filling out a ballot and explain new ID requirements. Along with paper supply-chain issues, the need for new forms created a host of problems for county officials, who have rejected higher-than-usual numbers of primary ballot applications this year across the state.

One new provision in the law says an application for a mail-in ballot must contain a driver’s license number or another identification issued by the Department of Public Safety, and people may use the last four digits of their Social Security number if they do not have a DPS-issued number. There is also a way to mark the form if they have neither, though this applies to a small percentage of the voting population.

The four elections officials who spoke with POLITICO said they saw numerous vote-by-mail applications from former voters who didn’t remember whether they put down their driver’s license or Social Security number — if they got it wrong, their application was rejected. Many officials have instructed people to fill out both fields in case the ID they used to register in the past doesn’t match this year’s application.

Taylor, from the secretary of state’s office, said he was aware of the early rejection rates and attributed them to the high levels of “confusion and misinformation” stemming from provisions in an earlier version of legislation.

While initial high rejection rates can be alarming, county officials said they have been individually contacting denied applicants to explain the changes and help them to “cure” their forms. Rates will continue to go down somewhat as the state approaches the Feb. 18 deadline for ballot-by-mail applications.

When asked whether any counties have run afoul of the new laws, Taylor said he isn’t aware of any legal action taken so far; instead, he said “the opposite” has occurred in many counties: “They’ve almost been overly restrictive on themselves.”

One example is the ID requirements. Another is the provision of SB 1 that prohibits “unlawful solicitation and distribution of application to vote by mail” and extends to early-voting materials. Taylor said the law doesn’t prohibit educating voters, and he added that some counties interpreted the rules too strictly toward the beginning, leading to problems.

Nicholas Solorzano, communications manager for Dallas County’s elections department, said county elections workers like himself have tried to be careful about toeing the line between soliciting someone’s vote and more generally educating them about their rights. Election officers said they constantly communicate with attorneys to avoid getting fined for accidentally violating the new law.

Solorzano cited the example of seniors now having to call their county election office to request a ballot application. If they want one for their spouse, the second person has to hop on the phone, too, since voters can’t request an application for anyone but themselves. Local officials sending out those applications in bulk, a normal practice before, could now be judged to be making an illegal solicitation, Solorzano said.

“What’s the difference between education and solicitation when you’re the Dallas County Elections Department?” Solorzano said. “That’s another overarching thing that’s kind of been worrying us — we’re erring very carefully on the side of only education and not soliciting at all.”

Texas has also implemented a statewide ballot tracking system as required by the new laws. Before, some individual counties offered the ability to trace vote status and update mistakes. Though Williamson County already had such a site, getting all counties to participate and supply information for the state tracker has been a source of many questions on training calls, Elections Administrator Christopher Davis said.

Overall, Davis said, he appreciates the opinion that the secretary of state’s response has been lackluster, but he has personally been pleased with how the state office has tried to train workers quickly.

Between preparing new election equipment, educating poll workers and enacting many of these provisions with little to no new budget for it, the whole process has been frustrating, said Harris County’s Longoria, who is a few months into the county's newly created position of elections administrator.

“We are in a purposefully reactive state instead of a proactive state,” Longoria said. “Now it’s increasing — the red tape and bureaucracy — around denying mail ballot applications, and quite frankly, I don’t think it adds any more security to the process, which was the big selling point of this bill.”