Texas quickly shows the impact GOP voting restrictions can have
Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir speaks to the media in Austin on Jan. 18. (Sergio Flores/Reuters)
by Aaron Blake
When Republican state legislatures across the country moved to add a raft of new voting restrictions after the 2020 election, a vein of contrarianism ran through some of the analysis. While the states were undoubtedly making it more difficult to vote in response to false claims of widespread voter fraud — and Democrats warned of damage done to democracy — some wagered that it seemed unlikely to have a large impact on election results.
Well, in very short order, the first state to hold a 2022 primary — Texas — has now shown just how big of an impact it can have.
The good news, to the extent there is some, is that it seems like a problem that could be largely fixed in relatively short order, if the will exists.
As The Washington Post reported before Texas’s March 1 primary, it’s been evident for more than a month that the state was experiencing very high levels of mail ballot rejections. And over the past week, we’ve learned a bunch of new details. At first, it was data from a few counties. But now, the Associated Press has crunched the numbers more or less statewide — obtaining data from 187 out of 254 counties, accounting for 85 percent of all ballots cast — and found some rather striking figures.
The top-line number is that 13 percent of all mail-in ballots — about 1 of every 8 — wound up being rejected. The vast majority of them were rejected because voters failed to meet the new ID requirements.
How unusual is that number? It’s difficult to compare it to other primaries, because ballot rejection rates aren’t so readily accessible for primaries. But if you compare it to general elections, it becomes clear it’s a massive number. In the last three federal general elections, mail ballot rejection rates have been between 0.8 percent and 1.4 percent.
In addition, the highest mail ballot rejection rate of any state in the 2020 election was Arkansas’s 6.4 percent. The number in Texas’s 2022 primary was double that.
The AP reports that only a few states compare to Texas’s rejection rate in any general election this century, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission: Indiana in 2006 (14.5 percent), New York in 2018 (13.7 percent) and Oregon in 2010 (12.7 percent).
Now we get to how much such a thing could matter — beyond people who thought they had voted not having their votes counted, of course.
The first thing we can say is that, relative to many other states, mail ballots just aren’t as big a piece of the electoral puzzle in Texas. That’s in large part because it restricts who can use them to those 65 and older, those who have disabilities and a few other categories. Out of more than 3 million votes in Texas’s Republican and Democratic primaries, fewer than 250,000 were cast by mail. If the 13 percent rejection rate held constant across all 254 counties, that would mean about 31,000 votes being rejected, or almost exactly 1 percent of all ballots.
What we can also say with a pretty high degree of certainty, though, is that it’s likely this hurts Democrats more, for a couple of reasons.
One is that the data have generally shown higher rejection rates in bigger — i.e. more urban and generally more Democratic — counties. The rejection rate in the state’s most-populous county, Houston-based Harris County, was 19 percent. In San Antonio-based Bexar County, it went up to 22 percent. At the same time, it’s not uniform. For example, Dallas County went for President Biden by even more than Harris and Bexar (giving him 65 percent), and it had a significantly lower rejection rate of 6.5 percent.
So it wasn’t initially clear that Democratic areas had higher rejection rates overall. But now it is.
All told, AP reports that the five most mail-ballot-heavy counties that went for President Donald Trump in 2020 had a rejection rate of 10 percent, while the five that went for President Biden had a 15.7 percent rejection rate.
There’s also the matter of just how many more Democrats vote by mail. In the 2022 primary, 1 in every 8 Democratic votes was by mail, compared to 1 in every 19 Republicans.
So if mail ballots are being rejected at a higher rate overall, it stands to reason that costs Democrats more. Layer on top the higher rejection rates in bigger Democratic counties, and it seems quite likely what’s happening.