Now Prove Your Existence

Voting by mail or know someone voting by mail in Texas?

You must include an ID number on both your application for a mail-in ballot AND on the envelope used to return it #txlege pic.twitter.com/sO5NtUD1Lw

— Alexa Ura (@alexazura) February 11, 2022

This is leading to a problem around the state:

The bulk of mail-in ballots have yet to arrive at elections offices, but local officials are already reporting that a significant number are coming in without the newly required ID information. As of Wednesday, election officials in Harris County alone had flagged 1,360 mail-in ballots to be sent back to voters — 40% of the mail-in ballots returned up to that point — because they lacked an ID number.

Under the state’s new rules, officials cannot accept ballots without the ID information on the return envelopes containing the ballot and must mail them back if there’s enough time for the voter to send back a corrected envelope.

“We’ll see how many we get back,” said Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator. “That’s our big question mark right now: Are voters going to go through the extra step to correct it?”

The new ID requirements are the earliest rule changes to kick in under the law that Republican lawmakers enacted last year to further tighten voting procedures in the state. The law, known as SB 1, ratchets up the state’s already strict rules for voting by mail by requiring absentee voters to include a state identification number like a driver’s license number, or — if they don’t have a driver’s license — a partial Social Security number, both when requesting a mail-in ballot and when returning a completed ballot.

Those numbers must match information in a voter’s record for ballot requests to be accepted and votes to be counted.

...

That includes Hays County, where about 30% of the voters who had already returned their mail-in ballots had not filled out the ID requirement. Those are early figures, as ballots are only starting to trickle in, so Jennifer Anderson, the county’s elections administrator, is hoping voter outreach efforts will help curb more errors.

“We usually have a very low rejection rate so it’s not something we want to see in Hays County,” Anderson said.

Other suburban counties are seeing similar rates. Election officials in Williamson County said about 30% of completed ballots were missing ID numbers.

Voters over 65 are automatically allowed to vote by mail.  They are also the age group considered most likely to vote Republican; and certainly the age group least likely to read the fine print and fill out the new ballot the way the instructions tell them to.  Already elderly voters used to the old vote-by-mail application process were screwing up applications for ballots, either by misreading the new form or just by using the old form (I had to search diligently to find the new form myself.  I knew to look for it, or I would have used the old form, which popped up first in my Google search.  Thus do "key words" betray our search efforts.  The old form had far more hits than the new one, so guess which was easier to find?)

The ID requirements forced a redesign of the carrier envelopes used to return mail-in ballots, allowing them to be sealed in a way that protects a voter’s sensitive information while traveling through the mail. The ID field was placed under the envelope flap. But based on early figures, local election officials this week said they feared voters were missing it altogether.

The voting law allows for a correction process, but local election officials and voters are facing a time crunch.

Defective ballots must be sent back to voters if they arrive early enough to be sent back and corrected. If officials determine there’s not enough time, they must notify the voter by phone or email. Voters must then visit the elections office in person to correct the issue, or use the state’s new online ballot tracker to verify the missing information.

Those determinations are made by panels of election workers responsible for qualifying mail-in ballots. The Texas secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections, has advised counties to convene those panels as early as possible to give voters the maximum amount of time to make a correction.

“Obviously the main concern, I think, with most election officials is that people that receive ballots by mail may not have the ability to come to the clerk’s office,” said Heather Hawthorne, the county clerk of Chambers County.

Just to point out, Chambers County has a population of just under 47,000.  The small town in Texas I grew up in was larger than that.  Such a population base doesn't generate a tax base large enough to hire large numbers of county employees to handle election issues like this.  Chambers is also, presumably, deep red. and the State hasn't provided any funds for new county employees to cope with this change in the law.  By way of an instructive aside:

Why do I get so angry when journalists and others who should know better use "fire in a crowded theater" to justify the regulation of constitutionally protected speech? It's not because I have some bizarre desire for people to falsely shout fire in crowded theaters. https://t.co/h9w3BSMiwT

— Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) February 11, 2022

That ruling, and its dicta, was overruled 50 years later in Brandenburg v Ohio (1969).  So while it was the law for 50 years, it is not been the law for 53 years. But ill-informed people (we really do a lousy job teaching civics in this country) still insist it is the law.  Same thing is going to linger, for decades, about Texas mail-in ballots.  And the majority of rejected ballots are not going to be submitted early enough to allow corrections to be made.

If you mail in a ballot, but don't use it, can you use a provisional ballot?  I know of one person who did.  She received a mail-in ballot (under the old law), decided not to use it, and voted in person.  But she had to use a provisional ballot, since the records showed she'd received a ballot (but it had not yet itself been received).  Could she have been guilty of voter fraud?  No, of course not; it was a provisional ballot, which would have been discarded had the mail-in ballot dropped over the transom in time.  But how many people are going to find out they didn't vote at all?  Or be able to vote at all?  Granted, this is only the primaries.  But will the system be straightened out by November?

I dunno.  When will we finally figure out that Schenck is no longer the law?  Meanwhile, who does this "Voter ID" measure help?  Or rather, who does it hurt?

The GOP really is its own worst enemy.