Our Man On Their Side

New @TwitterMoments: Partisan tactic by top Texas official's campaign delays thousands of voters' requests for mail-in ballots https://t.co/EWJd3q6qbp

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) February 17, 2022

A mass mailing by Patrick went out to Republican voters across the state in January, ahead of the March primary, and included a two-page letter emblazoned with the seal of his office encouraging voters to submit the requests following “three easy steps.”

 The problem was the third step, which instructed voters to return the applications in an enclosed reply envelope that was addressed to the state. 

 The lieutenant governor’s campaign said it used the secretary of state's address because “many Republican voters are rightly suspicious of Blue County election officials.” “The decision to direct return mail to the Secretary of State (SOS), someone who is trusted and respected, gave voters an added layer of comfort,” Allen Blakemore, a campaign consultant for Patrick, wrote in an email.

Which literally makes no sense, as the SOS has to forward the applications to the appropriate county anyway, which just slows things down. If you’re in Amarillo and send your application to Austin, it’s going to take a long time to get back to Amarillo (which is the county seat).

It’s not a brilliant strategy. It’s a complete cock up. Patrick wasn’t going to go to the trouble of sorting applications by county (there are 254 in Texas), and printing corresponding envelopes for 254 county clerks, then get the right envelopes to the right applicants.So they just said “Fuck it!”

Which is what they did.

The Texas SOS reports receiving “pallets” of applications, which it is sorting and sending on to the proper county officials. The SOS is not supposed to do this, so you can imagine it’s more than a little behind in this effort. And some counties are already facing massive rejection of applications for ballots due to the new law. Harris County (Houston) has asked the DOJ to intervene because rejections under the new law are so high.

Between the new law and Patrick’s clusterfuck, there’s going to be a lot of people who can’t vote by mail this year. A lot of those voters are going to be Republicans. Will they go to the trouble of voting in person, and probably having to cast a provisional ballot, further gumming up the works? (“More fraud!”)

We’ll see.