Texas
Ballot Security
What Politicians Say
Reliably Republican Texas thrust itself into the forefront of debate over the 2020 election, even though Trump easily carried the Lone Star State.
Attorney General Ken Paxton led a group of 19 states that asked the Supreme Court to halt certification of Biden electors in four states, and he beefed up a voter fraud unit. Just hours after Trump demanded an audit, Governor Greg Abbott’s administration announced it would review the results in four Democratic urban counties. And Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced he would pay up to $1 million for voter fraud tips.
Little came of those efforts. The Supreme Court dismissed Paxton’s lawsuit for lack of standing, while the attorney general’s voter fraud unit closed just 16 minor cases. The audit did not find any evidence of widespread fraud. And Patrick’s only payout so far was to a progressive poll worker in Pennsylvania who caught a Republican voting twice.
Still, Republican leaders have continued to press for changes to voting laws.
In 2021, Abbott signed into law a massive elections overhaul that rolled back voting innovations, restricted vote-by-mail and added new voter ID requirements that already led to one out of every eight mail ballots in this year’s primary being rejected.
But lawmakers struck the most controversial provision from the bill, which would have made it dramatically easier for a losing candidate to persuade a judge to overturn an election result by adopting the lowest standard of evidence possible in court.
Ease of Voting
The 2021 elections overhaul banned drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting, innovations used by Democratic-leaning urban counties to make voting easier for the disabled and people who work shifts and long hours.
But the law also extended early voting hours and required employers give workers time to head to the polls either during early voting or on Election Day.
The law targeted vote-by-mail, which is already among the most limited in the country. It barred local elections administrators from sending mail-in ballot applications to voters who have not requested them and banned ballot drop boxes.
The law also requires people helping someone cast a ballot to submit their name, address, relationship and whether they were paid by a campaign or political committee, under penalty of perjury.
Ballot Security
Texas previously verified mail-in ballots using signature matching, a method that has been shown to lead to more ballots being rejected from young, Black and Hispanic voters.
Under the elections overhaul, the state shifted to using either driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number to verify a mail-in ballot, a method widely used in other states.
That caused problems in the March primary elections, however, as many voters either missed the new requirement due to the design of the ballot envelope or used a number that did not match what was on file from their voter registration record, which can be decades old.
More than 24,000 ballots were rejected, 12% of mail-in ballots cast in March. By comparison, less than 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected in the entire US in the 2020 election, according to figures from the US. Election Assistance Commission.
According to the nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation, nearly 12% of touchscreen voting machines in Texas do not produce a paper record of the vote, the third-highest percentage among US states.
That can cause problems when aging touchscreens aren’t calibrated correctly, causing the machine to make the wrong selection.
While states like Indiana and Tennessee are working to get rid of their touchscreen voting machines, Texas has not made a similar effort.
How Politicians Responded to the 2020 Election
Abbott and other top state officials continue to cite the threat of voter fraud and push for more investigations and further changes to election law.
US Senator Ted Cruz volunteered to represent Trump before the Supreme Court if the case were accepted. He was also one of the leaders of the movement to block electors on Jan. 6, seconding the objection to Arizona.
Fifteen of the state’s 23 Republican representatives at the time also objected to Biden electors from Arizona, and 16 objected to Biden electors from Pennsylvania. Cruz objected to both states.
Representative Louie Gohmert also raised an objection to Wisconsin’s electors, although the motion died for lack of a second. Gohmert, who spoke at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, also sought a presidential pardon for his role in attempting to overturn the election, according to Trump aides who testified before the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attacks.
Fourteen Republican representatives also signed an amicus brief supporting the Texas lawsuit.