In Texas, the state’s Republican governor Greg Abbott came up with a new technique of voter suppression last week [Oct. 1] by directing two of the state’s predominantly Democratic counties to reduce the number of drop-off boxes for voters to deposit absentee ballots in advance of Election Day.
Abbott issued his proclamation two days after President Trump used the first presidential debate [Sept. 29] to repeat his call for supporters to assemble at polling places on Election Day, ostensibly to guard against voter fraud. The Texas governor similarly described his proclamation as an effort to “strengthen ballot security protocols throughout the state.”
Two Democratic counties were immediately affected by Abbott’s order that all of Texas’s 250 counties limit the number of ballot drop-off boxes within their expansive borders. Travis County, which includes the state capital of Austin, had to eliminate three of the four drop-off boxes already in place; Harris County, which includes the nation’s third largest city, Houston, had to get rid of eleven of its twelve drop-off boxes.
Democratic officials in both counties immediately criticized Abbott’s move as amounting to voter suppression. Voting rights groups filed federal court suits the next day challenging Abbott’s proclamation as a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.
Texas now joins several other battleground states with litigation over actions being taken to ease mail voting in the midst of a pandemic that makes in-person voting hazardous to voters’ health. Two of those cases – one from Pennsylvania and another from Arizona -- are now at the Supreme Court, which divided along partisan lines in a Wisconsin case in April in blocking a federal court order opposed by GOP legislators to extend absentee ballot deadlines.
Republican officials waging those legal battles echo Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings about likely fraud with expanded mail voting. Federal judges, however, have generally dismissed the allegations and allowed election officials, for example, to extend deadlines for receiving ballots given the likelihood of delays in the mails.
In the most recent ruling, a federal judge in Montana rejected an effort by the Trump campaign and GOP officials in the state to block the state’s 56 counties from conducting the Nov. 3 election by mail. In rejecting the suit, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen, an Obama appointee who served as chief judge for seven years, noted that the GOP officials “were compelled to concede that they cannot point to a single instance of voter fraud in Montana in any election during the last 20 years.”
In Texas, a spokesperson for Abbott was described by The Texas Tribune as failing to explain how multiple drop-off ballot boxes could lead to voter fraud. In Travis County, the county clerk Dana DeBeauvoir described Abbott’s proclamation as “a deliberate effort to manipulate the election.” In Harris County, the county’s chief executive Lina Hidalgo echoed that view. “This isn’t security, it’s suppression,” Hidalgo said.
Trump carried Texas, with its 38 electoral votes, by a 9 percentage point margin in 2016. His Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, carried Harris and Travis counties by substantial margins. In the most recent polls, Trump leads the Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, by an average of 2.5 percentage points.
With only one month before the Nov. 3 election, the federal court suits challenging Abbott’s order may not move fast enough to allow the two counties to re-establish some of the drop-off boxes that have been removed. The groups that filed the suits include the Texas and National Leagues of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters of Texas, and the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans.
Also last week, Republican legislators in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania asked the Supreme Court to intervene to stop a decision by the state’s high court to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day. The GOP lawmakers who filed the application in Scarnati v. Boockvar on Monday [Sept. 28] contended that the state court’s decision, aimed at accommodating likely mail delays, intruded on the legislature’s authority to set election rules.
Trump carried Pennsylvania with its 20 electoral votes by a 44,000-vote margin in 2016. Current polls show Biden with a 5.8 percentage point lead over Trump in the state. Pennsylvania is listed along with Michigan and Wisconsin as among the states crucial to Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 despite losing the nationwide popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
The Supreme Court took up another election-related case at the end of the week [Oct. 2] by agreeing to hear a plea by Arizona’s Republican attorney general to uphold two election laws struck down by a federal appeals court on the ground that they discriminated against minority voters. One of the laws requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct; the other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists, or others to collect ballots for delivery to polling places.
In striking down the “ballot collection” law, the en banc majority of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated that there was “no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.” The appeals court stayed its ruling; so the laws remain in effect for the Nov. 3 election. The justices’ decision to review the case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, tees it up for oral arguments early next year and a decision by the end of June.
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