The administration is suing to block a commonsense reform package that improves the security and accessibility of voting in the Lone Star State.
The administration is suing to block a commonsense reform package that improves the security and accessibility of voting in the Lone Star State.
P resident Biden has failed to usurp state oversight of elections in Congress, and now his DOJ has resorted to suing in order to block Texas’s commonsense election-reform law. Among other things, the legislation requires voter identification for voting by mail, creates uniform voting-hour guidelines throughout the state, and imposes civil and criminal penalties for vote harvesting.
The DOJ’s lawsuit is long on form and short on substance. Before it was passed, the Texas elections bill was often attacked as virulently racist, as “Jim Crow 2.0.” It was the subject of unfounded allegations of voter suppression, parroted by the media with little scrutiny. Yet when real evidence was demanded in a court of law, the Biden administration dropped those scurrilous arguments.
Instead, the administration based its case on narrow, technical provisions of the law related to voter assisters and ID numbers on mail-in ballots. These are not unimportant issues, but that the DOJ chose to hang its case on them reveals just how little substance there was underneath the hyperbolic attacks on the bill.
Returning to the Justice Department’s arguments, there are varying circumstances in which a voter will need assistance. Both federal and Texas law provide guidelines for such instances. Section 208 of the federal Voting Rights Act says that a voter who needs help owing to “blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice.”
States can place reasonable limits on how this assistance may be given, and the Texas elections law does just that: It permits assisters only to help a disabled voter read and mark the ballot. This approach puts voters who need help and voters who don’t on level ground. Non-disabled voters must cast their ballot in the polling booth with no influence from poll workers, and disabled voters should be subject to the same requirement. The Texas elections bill allows disabled voters to mitigate their disability while protecting their prerogative to make their own decisions.
The administration also argues that requiring an ID number on a mail-ballot application should not be necessary to determine if the applicant is eligible to vote. When debating the elections bill, Texas senators heard testimony in committee that the potential for voter fraud is greatest with mail-in ballots, because the voter’s identity is not confirmed by a poll worker at the time of voting. The ballot could be prepared and submitted by someone other than the registered voter. For example, Zul Mirza Mohamed, a past mayoral candidate in Carrollton, Texas, was recently indicted on 84 counts of mail-ballot fraud.
Formerly, Texas law required just the name and address of the registered voter on an early-voting-ballot application. Under the new elections law, the voter now must include an ID number, a reform that will make mail-ballot fraud much harder to pull off.
In Texas, voter-ID requirements have been hit with accusations of voter suppression before. A 2011 state law requiring voter identification for in-person voting received much the same treatment as the current election-reform law. Were voters suppressed after the 2011 bill was enacted? Quite the opposite. Voter registration increased by almost 30 percent in the decade following the bill’s enactment, from 13.27 million in November 2010 to 16.99 million in November 2021. By comparison, the state’s population increased by 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, from 25.21 million to 29.45 million.
President Biden has criticized Texas’s election-reform efforts as an “un-American” attack on the right to vote. His support for the more extreme versions of the For the People Act belies that criticism, however. This legislation would remove important election safeguards and diminish the value of the right he claims to want to protect. It represents the standard Democratic policy response to election issues: the centralizing of federal power and the compromising of election integrity.
In Texas, we are taking a different course. We believe that election integrity and voter access go hand in hand, and that the right to vote is important enough to be worth protecting. The Biden administration, sadly, doesn’t seem to agree.