Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
Or, some folks approve of disenfranchisement. How many drop off ballot boxes are left in the largest county that includes Houston after passage of SB1? How many were available prior? And we all know who lives in Houston, right?
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
Or, some folks approve of disenfranchisement. How many drop off ballot boxes are left in the largest county that includes Houston after passage of SB1? How many were available prior? And we all know who lives in Houston, right?
No surprise these folks are all in democratic counties too. All according to plan...
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
There is no easy way for voters to check? I have a hard time believing that. They can't call their local county election office and check?
i've said it before and i'll say it again....in manitoba, we need a driver's license or government issued ID to vote. AND you need to have your voting card that was mailed to you. AND you have to go to a specific polling station.
I don't hear anyone in canada complaining about voter suppression.
now, I think there are nefarious efforts by republicans to fuck with the vote (gerrymandering, for example), but I've never seen an issue with proving you are eligible to vote.
"Oh Canada...you're beautiful when you're drunk" -EV 8/14/93
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
But wait...there are more ways they are getting rid of eligible voters
New Texas Voting Law Snags US Citizens, Mail Ballot Requests
Published January 15, 2022 • Updated on January 15, 2022 at 9:42 pm
(AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
FILE – Demonstrators join a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information.
“It’s just a bad situation on a number of levels,” said James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of several voting rights groups that has sued the state over the new law.
The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The national GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Joe Biden.
Democrats have strenuously objected — including by walking out and to gridlock the Legislature, warning it could disenfranchise untold numbers of voters, especially Black, Latino and Asian people. Many of its provisions, such as expanded powers for partisan poll watchers, don’t take effect until the election. But Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. But some who received the warning letters were citizens.
Monty Tew, a 52-year-old who was born in Texas, said he couldn’t understand why he got the letter asking him to prove his citizenship. He said he paid $30 to request a copy of his birth certificate, which he then sent the county a picture of as proof of citizenship and was soon notified the issue was resolved.
“I feel fortunate for that not to have been that big of a deal, it wasn’t that burdensome,” said Tew, of Round Rock, a city outside Austin. “But I can imagine how that can be a much bigger flogging for someone else perhaps, if they didn’t have their hands on technology or if paying someone $30 to get something that was a waste of your time, money and effort could be a hassle.”
Then this week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. Texas already had some of the nation’s most restrictive mail-in ballot rules, and was among only a handful of states that did not expand mail balloting in 2020 during the pandemic.
As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”
The Secretary of State’s office said in a statement Friday that counties should check with it on how to properly reject mail ballots. It had previously said the letters warning voters they may lose their right to vote were sent as part of the implementation of the new voting law. That measure includes provisions setting out a procedure to comply with a settlement of a 2019 lawsuit settlement over the last time Texas had tried to weed out noncitizen voters and ended up threatening to revoke the registration of large numbers of U.S. citizens as well.
“Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship to their county voter registrar within 30 days of receiving the notice of examination will have their registration cancelled, with the opportunity to be reinstated if the voter later provides proof of citizenship, including at the polling place,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the office.
Of the 2,327 voters whose registration have been canceled through the procedure, 278 have been confirmed as noncitizens, Taylor said.
But civil rights groups say the state is not taking the correct steps to ensure U.S. citizens don’t get caught in the process. The state is supposed to only flag people who identified as noncitizens on their driver’s licenses after registering to vote. But it’s also catching some like Harish Vyalla, 35, of Austin, who said he has voted in the county at least twice since becoming a US citizen in 2013.
“I had no concerns because I know I am a citizen with proper documentation, but I was surprised because nobody had asked me in the past,” said Vyalla, adding it took about a month to preserve his right to vote. “The government should already have all these proofs and documents in hand.”
Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped write the settlement of the 2019 case. She said state state officials are clearly not following it and are setting themselves up for another lawsuit.
Perales said Texas voters should brace for a potential rocky voting experience as the law’s provisions fully kick in during the March 1 primary.
“Texans would be well-served to know their rights when they go to the polls, because I think there’ll be confusion and doubt for a lot of voters,” Perales said.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
Does this issue only effect Democrat voters? or are Republican susceptible to this same issue?
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
But wait...there are more ways they are getting rid of eligible voters
New Texas Voting Law Snags US Citizens, Mail Ballot Requests
Published January 15, 2022 • Updated on January 15, 2022 at 9:42 pm
(AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
FILE – Demonstrators join a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information.
“It’s just a bad situation on a number of levels,” said James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of several voting rights groups that has sued the state over the new law.
The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The national GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Joe Biden.
Democrats have strenuously objected — including by walking out and to gridlock the Legislature, warning it could disenfranchise untold numbers of voters, especially Black, Latino and Asian people. Many of its provisions, such as expanded powers for partisan poll watchers, don’t take effect until the election. But Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. But some who received the warning letters were citizens.
Monty Tew, a 52-year-old who was born in Texas, said he couldn’t understand why he got the letter asking him to prove his citizenship. He said he paid $30 to request a copy of his birth certificate, which he then sent the county a picture of as proof of citizenship and was soon notified the issue was resolved.
“I feel fortunate for that not to have been that big of a deal, it wasn’t that burdensome,” said Tew, of Round Rock, a city outside Austin. “But I can imagine how that can be a much bigger flogging for someone else perhaps, if they didn’t have their hands on technology or if paying someone $30 to get something that was a waste of your time, money and effort could be a hassle.”
Then this week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. Texas already had some of the nation’s most restrictive mail-in ballot rules, and was among only a handful of states that did not expand mail balloting in 2020 during the pandemic.
As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”
The Secretary of State’s office said in a statement Friday that counties should check with it on how to properly reject mail ballots. It had previously said the letters warning voters they may lose their right to vote were sent as part of the implementation of the new voting law. That measure includes provisions setting out a procedure to comply with a settlement of a 2019 lawsuit settlement over the last time Texas had tried to weed out noncitizen voters and ended up threatening to revoke the registration of large numbers of U.S. citizens as well.
“Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship to their county voter registrar within 30 days of receiving the notice of examination will have their registration cancelled, with the opportunity to be reinstated if the voter later provides proof of citizenship, including at the polling place,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the office.
Of the 2,327 voters whose registration have been canceled through the procedure, 278 have been confirmed as noncitizens, Taylor said.
But civil rights groups say the state is not taking the correct steps to ensure U.S. citizens don’t get caught in the process. The state is supposed to only flag people who identified as noncitizens on their driver’s licenses after registering to vote. But it’s also catching some like Harish Vyalla, 35, of Austin, who said he has voted in the county at least twice since becoming a US citizen in 2013.
“I had no concerns because I know I am a citizen with proper documentation, but I was surprised because nobody had asked me in the past,” said Vyalla, adding it took about a month to preserve his right to vote. “The government should already have all these proofs and documents in hand.”
Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped write the settlement of the 2019 case. She said state state officials are clearly not following it and are setting themselves up for another lawsuit.
Perales said Texas voters should brace for a potential rocky voting experience as the law’s provisions fully kick in during the March 1 primary.
“Texans would be well-served to know their rights when they go to the polls, because I think there’ll be confusion and doubt for a lot of voters,” Perales said.
I have an idea! If you don't like how your state operates, you can leave the state. Or did they make laws banning people from leaving?
Many people are moving to Texas at a record pace so they must not have read your posts here on this message board.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
He thinks barriers need to exist though (despite hailing the progress we made in 2020 yesterday). Making it harder for people to vote is what these people want.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
But wait...there are more ways they are getting rid of eligible voters
New Texas Voting Law Snags US Citizens, Mail Ballot Requests
Published January 15, 2022 • Updated on January 15, 2022 at 9:42 pm
(AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
FILE – Demonstrators join a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information.
“It’s just a bad situation on a number of levels,” said James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of several voting rights groups that has sued the state over the new law.
The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The national GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Joe Biden.
Democrats have strenuously objected — including by walking out and to gridlock the Legislature, warning it could disenfranchise untold numbers of voters, especially Black, Latino and Asian people. Many of its provisions, such as expanded powers for partisan poll watchers, don’t take effect until the election. But Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. But some who received the warning letters were citizens.
Monty Tew, a 52-year-old who was born in Texas, said he couldn’t understand why he got the letter asking him to prove his citizenship. He said he paid $30 to request a copy of his birth certificate, which he then sent the county a picture of as proof of citizenship and was soon notified the issue was resolved.
“I feel fortunate for that not to have been that big of a deal, it wasn’t that burdensome,” said Tew, of Round Rock, a city outside Austin. “But I can imagine how that can be a much bigger flogging for someone else perhaps, if they didn’t have their hands on technology or if paying someone $30 to get something that was a waste of your time, money and effort could be a hassle.”
Then this week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. Texas already had some of the nation’s most restrictive mail-in ballot rules, and was among only a handful of states that did not expand mail balloting in 2020 during the pandemic.
As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”
The Secretary of State’s office said in a statement Friday that counties should check with it on how to properly reject mail ballots. It had previously said the letters warning voters they may lose their right to vote were sent as part of the implementation of the new voting law. That measure includes provisions setting out a procedure to comply with a settlement of a 2019 lawsuit settlement over the last time Texas had tried to weed out noncitizen voters and ended up threatening to revoke the registration of large numbers of U.S. citizens as well.
“Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship to their county voter registrar within 30 days of receiving the notice of examination will have their registration cancelled, with the opportunity to be reinstated if the voter later provides proof of citizenship, including at the polling place,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the office.
Of the 2,327 voters whose registration have been canceled through the procedure, 278 have been confirmed as noncitizens, Taylor said.
But civil rights groups say the state is not taking the correct steps to ensure U.S. citizens don’t get caught in the process. The state is supposed to only flag people who identified as noncitizens on their driver’s licenses after registering to vote. But it’s also catching some like Harish Vyalla, 35, of Austin, who said he has voted in the county at least twice since becoming a US citizen in 2013.
“I had no concerns because I know I am a citizen with proper documentation, but I was surprised because nobody had asked me in the past,” said Vyalla, adding it took about a month to preserve his right to vote. “The government should already have all these proofs and documents in hand.”
Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped write the settlement of the 2019 case. She said state state officials are clearly not following it and are setting themselves up for another lawsuit.
Perales said Texas voters should brace for a potential rocky voting experience as the law’s provisions fully kick in during the March 1 primary.
“Texans would be well-served to know their rights when they go to the polls, because I think there’ll be confusion and doubt for a lot of voters,” Perales said.
I have an idea! If you don't like how your state operates, you can leave the state. Or did they make laws banning people from leaving?
Many people are moving to Texas at a record pace so they must not have read your posts here on this message board.
Yeah! Love it or leave it, you poor elderly folk! America!
Modern day Republican party, folks. Tell me again its not a cult?
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
I totally agree with you on putting both DL and SS to clear this up. I don't get to vote in Texas so I can't make that difference. The law is the law and if you want to make sure your vote counts, there are ways to verify this information. If you want to complain about the law, that is your choice but you can't tell me that it is impossible to make this work because it clearly is not.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
He thinks barriers need to exist though (despite hailing the progress we made in 2020 yesterday). Making it harder for people to vote is what these people want.
HughFreakingDillon commented on the requirements in Manitoba. Do you think they are suppressing votes?
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
Does this issue only effect Democrat voters? or are Republican susceptible to this same issue?
It disproportionately affects dem voters. If it affects way more repubs than dems, would you be for it?
And hey ho! Someone had to pay $30 for a copy of their birth certificate to prove to their local election board that they’re a citizen. See? A poll tax. After we were told that the federal government had eliminated them. But since it applies to everyone, it’s not disenfranchisement.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
I totally agree with you on putting both DL and SS to clear this up. I don't get to vote in Texas so I can't make that difference. The law is the law and if you want to make sure your vote counts, there are ways to verify this information. If you want to complain about the law, that is your choice but you can't tell me that it is impossible to make this work because it clearly is not.
The issue isn't "impossible", it's the intentional difficulty. How many people know what they used when they first registered? I sure as hell don't.
Here in Virginia there are 93 bills written already by the new House of Delegates to restrict access, and the legislature just convened. And btw we already have to show ID to vote.
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
The very first FAQ explains how to look this information up and even says, call the voter registrar's office.
Call the registar? Is that a efficient as calling the DMV? We all love calling govt offices.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
I totally agree with you on putting both DL and SS to clear this up. I don't get to vote in Texas so I can't make that difference. The law is the law and if you want to make sure your vote counts, there are ways to verify this information. If you want to complain about the law, that is your choice but you can't tell me that it is impossible to make this work because it clearly is not.
There are a lot of legitimate barriers to voting for many individuals. There's also intentional friction added to the process to dissuade specific groups from voting. The former should be worked on, and the latter shouldn't be acceptable to anyone.
'05 - TO, '06 - TO 1, '08 - NYC 1 & 2, '09 - TO, Chi 1 & 2, '10 - Buffalo, NYC 1 & 2, '11 - TO 1 & 2, Hamilton, '13 - Buffalo, Brooklyn 1 & 2, '15 - Global Citizen, '16 - TO 1 & 2, Chi 2
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
NY was one of the states going to change the way they vote. One thing they talked about was letting people vote locally even if you don't have an immigration status.
I understand their reasoning, if you live there you should be able to vote. This doesn't bode well for dems arguments though and plays right in the hands of the repubs.
I disagree with it.
I would like to see Voting Day a national holiday and ID required to vote.
This is where I check my registration status before every election in Texas. https://teamrv-mvp.sos.texas.gov/MVP/mvp.do It is quite easy. I know not everyone has access to the internet. I'm more worried about limiting early voting and ballot drop off locations.
One of the provisions for the Freedom to Vote Act calls for an end to partisan gerrymandering. It's obvious why Republicans oppose that. But, rational thinking people know better.
DeSantis pushes Florida redistricting map that heavily favors Republicans
Updated 6:23 PM ET, Tue January 18, 2022
(CNN)For political observers who have wondered for months how far Republicans should press their advantage in Florida when drawing the state's new congressional boundaries, they now have a response from Gov. Ron DeSantis: all the way.
DeSantis threw a surprise wrench into the state's redistricting process late Sunday night when his office submitted for consideration a new congressional map that heavily favors his party. The highly partisan offering pins Democratic-leaning seats to three urban areas -- Tampa, Orlando and Miami -- and gives Republicans the advantage in at least 18 of the 28 districts in the state and as many as 20.
Dave Wasserman, an editor of The Cook Political Report and a redistricting guru, called DeSantis' proposal on Twitter "the most brutal gerrymander proposed by a Florida (Republican) yet."
If the goal of this unusual step was to energize Republicans closely watching redistricting in Florida, then mission accomplished. DeSantis, widely seen as a contender for the White House in 2024, was immediately cheered on by party activists from around the country who wanted the GOP to ram through a map.
"I had a TON of people come up to me at the Trump Rally in ARIZONA asking about Florida Congressional Maps & if DeSantis was going to get involved," Christian Ziegler, the vice chairman of the Florida GOP, tweeted on Sunday night. "24 hours later...Looks like we have an answer!"
"This is news to me," state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, the GOP point man on redistricting, told CNN on Monday. Rodrigues added that anyone in the state is allowed to submit a proposed map through the Legislature's online portal.
The deliberations in Tallahassee have been closely watched because Florida represents one of the few places where the GOP can use the redistricting process to significantly improve its chances of picking up seats and winning back the US House of Representatives this November. Republicans in the state control the state House, Senate and governor's office. And the state Supreme Court is stacked with Republican appointees, including three made by DeSantis.
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election attorney, said partisans often want their parties to draw aggressive maps, but it's often more complicated in fast-growing states. Republicans in Texas were in a spot similar to Florida's and chose to shore up vulnerable districts instead of expanding their opportunities to win seats.
"You have to balance emerging demographic trends with what you want to do politically," Ginsberg said. "If the census turns out to be inaccurate, it makes an aggressive map more vulnerable."
The Florida Senate recently advanced its map largely maintaining the status quo, much to the delight of Democrats and nonpartisan groups, which praised the proposal as competitive and fair.
As it stands, there are 16 Republicans in the state's congressional delegation and 11 Democrats. Florida gained an additional seat after the 2020 census.
State House Republicans had proposed a map that went further to push the GOP advantage than the state Senate's, but not nearly as far as DeSantis'.
Whether Republican lawmakers now line up behind DeSantis' proposal -- and how forcefully the governor pushes for it -- will depend on how much they're willing to stomach a protracted legal fight.
Already, Democrats have dismissed the DeSantis map as unserious, accusing the governor of blatantly violating the state Constitution's Fair District amendment and the Voting Rights Act. In addition to carving up communities that long shared the same congressional district, DeSantis' map would eliminate some minority access districts, including the north Florida congressional seat currently held by US Rep. Al Lawson.
Lawson, a Democrat who represents the majority-black areas from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, said he learned that DeSantis had eliminated his seat on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
"It's insensitive to the constituents in this area and demonstrates a lack of concern about minority representation," Lawson told CNN.
Marc Elias, the Democratic elections lawyer spearheading voting and redistricting challenges in several states, wrote on Twitter that he looked forward to deposing DeSantis and his staff "to fully understand the illegal partisan motivations of this map."
Many Republican lawmakers in Florida remember the bruising court battles the last time lawmakers had to draw congressional maps. The drama, which started in 2011, finally ended in 2015 when the state Supreme Court approved new maps drawn by the legal challengers.
Rodrigues said he's confident the map that the Senate produced "meets all federal requirements, constitutional requirements and state constitutional requirements."
Ryan Newman, general counsel for DeSantis, said the governor's office had "legal concerns with the congressional redistricting maps under consideration in the Legislature."
"Because the Governor must approve any congressional map passed by the Legislature, we wanted to provide our proposal as soon as possible and in a transparent manner," Newman said.
DeSantis' latest maneuver has left many Democrats wondering what his endgame is. Is this a bargaining chip to extract other legislative priorities from Republicans? A move to save face with future GOP primary voters? Or is he prepared to take this esoteric battle to the state Supreme Court?
"Do I think this map is likely to become law? No," said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic strategist and the party's redistricting expert. "Have I ruled it out entirely? No. You can't be sure what lawmakers will do if he makes outright threats."
State Sen. Randolph Bracy, a Democrat who serves on the Senate redistricting committee, opined that DeSantis was "a messaging tool based on wanting to be president."
Ginsberg said it could be that DeSantis sees an opportunity in the legal landscape to be as aggressive as possible. While it's perhaps likely the US Supreme Court will frown on a map that violates established laws about minority access to congressional districts, nothing is guaranteed with this new 6-3 conservative majority, he said.
"Given the current makeup of the US Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court, Democrats are banging the drum without a judicial stopgap to back it up," said Ginsberg. "Political gerrymandering, given the US Supreme Court rulings last decade, is going nowhere."
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
But wait...there are more ways they are getting rid of eligible voters
New Texas Voting Law Snags US Citizens, Mail Ballot Requests
Published January 15, 2022 • Updated on January 15, 2022 at 9:42 pm
(AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
FILE – Demonstrators join a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information.
“It’s just a bad situation on a number of levels,” said James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of several voting rights groups that has sued the state over the new law.
The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The national GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Joe Biden.
Democrats have strenuously objected — including by walking out and to gridlock the Legislature, warning it could disenfranchise untold numbers of voters, especially Black, Latino and Asian people. Many of its provisions, such as expanded powers for partisan poll watchers, don’t take effect until the election. But Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. But some who received the warning letters were citizens.
Monty Tew, a 52-year-old who was born in Texas, said he couldn’t understand why he got the letter asking him to prove his citizenship. He said he paid $30 to request a copy of his birth certificate, which he then sent the county a picture of as proof of citizenship and was soon notified the issue was resolved.
“I feel fortunate for that not to have been that big of a deal, it wasn’t that burdensome,” said Tew, of Round Rock, a city outside Austin. “But I can imagine how that can be a much bigger flogging for someone else perhaps, if they didn’t have their hands on technology or if paying someone $30 to get something that was a waste of your time, money and effort could be a hassle.”
Then this week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. Texas already had some of the nation’s most restrictive mail-in ballot rules, and was among only a handful of states that did not expand mail balloting in 2020 during the pandemic.
As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”
The Secretary of State’s office said in a statement Friday that counties should check with it on how to properly reject mail ballots. It had previously said the letters warning voters they may lose their right to vote were sent as part of the implementation of the new voting law. That measure includes provisions setting out a procedure to comply with a settlement of a 2019 lawsuit settlement over the last time Texas had tried to weed out noncitizen voters and ended up threatening to revoke the registration of large numbers of U.S. citizens as well.
“Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship to their county voter registrar within 30 days of receiving the notice of examination will have their registration cancelled, with the opportunity to be reinstated if the voter later provides proof of citizenship, including at the polling place,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the office.
Of the 2,327 voters whose registration have been canceled through the procedure, 278 have been confirmed as noncitizens, Taylor said.
But civil rights groups say the state is not taking the correct steps to ensure U.S. citizens don’t get caught in the process. The state is supposed to only flag people who identified as noncitizens on their driver’s licenses after registering to vote. But it’s also catching some like Harish Vyalla, 35, of Austin, who said he has voted in the county at least twice since becoming a US citizen in 2013.
“I had no concerns because I know I am a citizen with proper documentation, but I was surprised because nobody had asked me in the past,” said Vyalla, adding it took about a month to preserve his right to vote. “The government should already have all these proofs and documents in hand.”
Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped write the settlement of the 2019 case. She said state state officials are clearly not following it and are setting themselves up for another lawsuit.
Perales said Texas voters should brace for a potential rocky voting experience as the law’s provisions fully kick in during the March 1 primary.
“Texans would be well-served to know their rights when they go to the polls, because I think there’ll be confusion and doubt for a lot of voters,” Perales said.
I have an idea! If you don't like how your state operates, you can leave the state. Or did they make laws banning people from leaving?
Many people are moving to Texas at a record pace so they must not have read your posts here on this message board.
Yeah! Love it or leave it, you poor elderly folk! America!
Modern day Republican party, folks. Tell me again its not a cult?
as if getting up and moving from your state is such an easy endeavor.
anybody that thinks it is that simple has never done it.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
"Under Texas’ new voting law,
absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID
number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social
Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs,
voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification.
Counties must match those numbers against the information in an
individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot."
What is the issue with making sure someone is who they say they are?
Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Imagine that? Coming up with a way to invalidate a ballot on a legal “technicality.” Sorry, you used your DL # last time and your SS# this time and regardless, that 3 looks like an 8 and we don’t have that number matching up with that name on file. Thanks for living in Tejas and paying taxes without representation.
Does this issue only effect Democrat voters? or are Republican susceptible to this same issue?
It disproportionately affects dem voters. If it affects way more repubs than dems, would you be for it?
the answer is easy. if it impacted more republicans, they would not have passed these laws.
many republicans have said the quiet part out loud, that being "the fewer people that vote, the better it is for us."
can people not see the motive in the laws that are being passed?
the gop thinktanks are smart. they would not do something just to do it. they spend their time, money, and effor on sure bets.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Comments
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https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2022-01-18/texas-rejects-hundreds-of-mail-ballot-applications-under-new-voting-limits
Texas Rejects Hundreds of Mail Ballot Applications Under New Voting Limits
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media after Travis County election officials said that due to Texas' new voting law SB1, half of vote-by-mail applications for March primaries had been rejected, in Austin, Texas, U.S. January 18, 2022. REUTERS/Sergio FloresREUTERS
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) - Texas election officials have rejected hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, abiding by a new Republican-backed law just weeks before a March 1 primary kicks off this year's U.S. election cycle.
"My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like," Democrat Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told reporters on Tuesday.
The county, home to the state capital Austin, invalidated approximately 300 applications because people failed to meet the law's stricter identification requirements, said DeBeauvoir, who retires at month's end.
Lawmakers in Texas approved a raft of voting restrictions last year, one of many efforts in Republican-controlled states to pass new limits after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud.
Democrats in Congress this week renewed their push to pass sweeping voting rights legislation https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-democrats-start-voting-rights-showdown-with-no-clear-path-victory-2022-01-18 that would overturn limits such as the Texas law, but the effort appears doomed in the face of united Republican opposition.
The Texas bill prompted some Democratic legislators to flee the state for weeks to prevent the state House of Representatives from having the quorum necessary to pass it, though they eventually relented.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill in September and is seeking re-election this year, has said the law, known as Senate Bill 1, will increase public trust in elections.
The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the legislation, saying it disenfranchises voters. Democrats say such restrictions discriminate against Black voters and other minorities who traditionally support Democratic candidates.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had rejected 409 out of 1,373 applications as of last Friday for ID problems, including 309 missing ID numbers and 173 with numbers that did not match those on file, according to Leah Shah, a spokesperson for the county elections office.
In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, officials had processed more than 300 rejections through last week out of some 1,200 applications, elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a phone interview. Around 80% of those were due to the new ID requirements.
Other provisions in the law are also creating obstacles, she said. The office previously added a sticker with voters' addresses to applications that were mailed out to save them a step, but that is no longer permitted, Callanen said.
The law also prohibits residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives. Callanen said her office regularly receives messages from senior citizens asking for ballots for themselves and their spouses; under the law, spouses must make their own separate requests.
"It's sort of thwarting us at every turn," she said.
Mail ballots in Texas are already sharply limited to a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents or voters who will be absent from their county during early voting and Election Day.
DeBeauvoir said Secretary of State John Scott's office had failed to give local officials enough guidance on how to help voters cure any defects.
In response, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott's office, said state officials reached out to Travis County last week to advise staff on the proper process and noted that the county's own estimated rejection rate went down from 50% to 27% following that guidance.
He said clerks have been instructed to accept applications in which voters have included both their license and Social Security number, as long as one of them matches what is on file.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Howard Goller)
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Why add additional barriers to solve an imaginary problem? Healthy democracies do not purposefully put barriers in place to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The answer to your question lies in the very same article you are replying to, but I am assuming did not read.
Among other provisions, the law requires voters applying for a mail ballot to provide either a driver's license or Social Security number, which must match the number they gave when first registering to vote.
That leaves some voters playing a "guessing game," DeBeauvoir said, because many people cannot recall which number they provided originally and there is no easy way for voters to check.
I don't hear anyone in canada complaining about voter suppression.
now, I think there are nefarious efforts by republicans to fuck with the vote (gerrymandering, for example), but I've never seen an issue with proving you are eligible to vote.
-EV 8/14/93
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https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/texas-news/new-texas-voting-law-snags-us-citizens-mail-ballot-requests-2/2859829/
New Texas Voting Law Snags US Citizens, Mail Ballot Requests
Published January 15, 2022 • Updated on January 15, 2022 at 9:42 pm
FILE – Demonstrators join a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
A sweeping new Texas voting law that Republicans muscled through the Legislature last year over dramatic protests is drawing fire again, even before some of the most contentious restrictions and changes kick in ahead of the state’s first-in-the nation primary.
Thousands of Texans — including some U.S. citizens — have received letters saying they have been flagged as potential noncitizens who could be kicked off voting rolls. And this week, local elections officials said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications are being rejected for not including required new information.
“It’s just a bad situation on a number of levels,” said James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of several voting rights groups that has sued the state over the new law.
The Texas law was approved last year by Republicans, who joined their party colleagues in at least 18 states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, in enacting new voting restrictions since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The national GOP campaign to tighten voting laws has been partly driven by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the election, not President Joe Biden.
Democrats have strenuously objected — including by walking out and to gridlock the Legislature, warning it could disenfranchise untold numbers of voters, especially Black, Latino and Asian people. Many of its provisions, such as expanded powers for partisan poll watchers, don’t take effect until the election. But Democrats and civil rights groups say what has happened so far is alarming.
First, Texas sent letters to more than 11,000 voters warning them their registrations will be canceled unless they prove to their local elections office they are citizens. More than 2,000 registrations ended after the voters did not come in, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. But some who received the warning letters were citizens.
Monty Tew, a 52-year-old who was born in Texas, said he couldn’t understand why he got the letter asking him to prove his citizenship. He said he paid $30 to request a copy of his birth certificate, which he then sent the county a picture of as proof of citizenship and was soon notified the issue was resolved.
“I feel fortunate for that not to have been that big of a deal, it wasn’t that burdensome,” said Tew, of Round Rock, a city outside Austin. “But I can imagine how that can be a much bigger flogging for someone else perhaps, if they didn’t have their hands on technology or if paying someone $30 to get something that was a waste of your time, money and effort could be a hassle.”
Then this week, election administrators in some of Texas’ largest counties, which are run by Democrats, began raising early alarms about hundreds of mail-in ballot applications they’ve had to reject for not complying with strict new provisions.
Tucked into the 76-page law is a new requirement that voter include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications, or the number of a state-issued identification.
Counties then match those numbers to their records before mailing an actual ballot. Texas already had some of the nation’s most restrictive mail-in ballot rules, and was among only a handful of states that did not expand mail balloting in 2020 during the pandemic.
As of Friday, Harris County officials said they had rejected more than 200 of 1,200 applications from voters in the Houston area. In Austin, county election officials put the rate of rejections at roughly 50%.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “At this point, to be so low in the number of applications and have a 20 percent rejection rate for the primaries? It’s really got me worried.”
The Secretary of State’s office said in a statement Friday that counties should check with it on how to properly reject mail ballots. It had previously said the letters warning voters they may lose their right to vote were sent as part of the implementation of the new voting law. That measure includes provisions setting out a procedure to comply with a settlement of a 2019 lawsuit settlement over the last time Texas had tried to weed out noncitizen voters and ended up threatening to revoke the registration of large numbers of U.S. citizens as well.
“Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship to their county voter registrar within 30 days of receiving the notice of examination will have their registration cancelled, with the opportunity to be reinstated if the voter later provides proof of citizenship, including at the polling place,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the office.
Of the 2,327 voters whose registration have been canceled through the procedure, 278 have been confirmed as noncitizens, Taylor said.
But civil rights groups say the state is not taking the correct steps to ensure U.S. citizens don’t get caught in the process. The state is supposed to only flag people who identified as noncitizens on their driver’s licenses after registering to vote. But it’s also catching some like Harish Vyalla, 35, of Austin, who said he has voted in the county at least twice since becoming a US citizen in 2013.
“I had no concerns because I know I am a citizen with proper documentation, but I was surprised because nobody had asked me in the past,” said Vyalla, adding it took about a month to preserve his right to vote. “The government should already have all these proofs and documents in hand.”
Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped write the settlement of the 2019 case. She said state state officials are clearly not following it and are setting themselves up for another lawsuit.
Perales said Texas voters should brace for a potential rocky voting experience as the law’s provisions fully kick in during the March 1 primary.
“Texans would be well-served to know their rights when they go to the polls, because I think there’ll be confusion and doubt for a lot of voters,” Perales said.
Why create such an archaic provision? Why not put both DL and soc spaces and if one matches, you move forward? These are the little barriers that get people to drop out.
Modern day Republican party, folks. Tell me again its not a cult?
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Here in Virginia there are 93 bills written already by the new House of Delegates to restrict access, and the legislature just convened. And btw we already have to show ID to vote.
EV
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https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/33092591/alabama-crimson-tide-coach-nick-saban-urges-west-virginia-sen-joe-manchin-back-freedom-vote-act
I understand their reasoning, if you live there you should be able to vote. This doesn't bode well for dems arguments though and plays right in the hands of the repubs.
I disagree with it.
I would like to see Voting Day a national holiday and ID required to vote.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/poll-closures-rural-lincoln-county-georgia/index.html
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There are no kings inside the gates of eden
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/politics/florida-redistricting-desantis/index.html
DeSantis pushes Florida redistricting map that heavily favors Republicans
Updated 6:23 PM ET, Tue January 18, 2022
(CNN)For political observers who have wondered for months how far Republicans should press their advantage in Florida when drawing the state's new congressional boundaries, they now have a response from Gov. Ron DeSantis: all the way.
anybody that thinks it is that simple has never done it.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
many republicans have said the quiet part out loud, that being "the fewer people that vote, the better it is for us."
can people not see the motive in the laws that are being passed?
the gop thinktanks are smart. they would not do something just to do it. they spend their time, money, and effor on sure bets.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."