HOUSTON — Retired gym teacher John Lengers would have preferred to cast his ballot by mail in Tuesday’s primary. But he chose not to risk it under Texas’s new election rules, which require voters to include an identification number on their ballot envelope that matches their registration record.
Lengers is among the many Texans tripped up in the country’s first major primary of the year by a restrictive new voting law that the Republican-controlled legislature and Gov. Greg Abbott enacted last fall. Tens of thousands of mail ballots have been rejected for failing the new ID requirements, while election administrators have struggled to adopt new rules that state officials were still providing guidelines for as recently as Thursday. Some voters bemoaned new prohibitions on pandemic-era rules making it easier to vote, including drive-through voting sites. The Harris County elections website briefly shut down Tuesday morning as demands for information soared.
Democrats and voting rights advocates predicted for months that Senate Bill 1, as the new law is known, would make it harder for some Texans to vote and for election officials to do their jobs. Tuesday’s primary made clear that those predictions, so far, have come true — providing a glimpse of what voting could look like in more than a dozen states that enacted similarly restrictive laws in the aftermath of the 2020 contest.
GOP leaders said the legislation was necessary to prevent the kind of ballot fraud that former president Donald Trump claimed without evidence had tainted the 2020 presidential election.
Supporters of S.B. 1 dismissed concerns and noted that high rejection rates of mail ballot applications at the start of the year had diminished significantly, and said they expected many thousands of rejected ballots to be fixed, too. Despite fears of voter suppression, turnout on Tuesday was on pace for a typical midterm primary. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R), a co-author of the legislation, noted that the proportion of Republicans whose mail-in ballot applications were rejected was higher than that of Democrats.
“If this is a massive conspiracy to deny people the vote, it’s having the reverse effect,” he said. “As a result, I completely reject that line of thinking.”
But critics said the real purpose of the law was to erect new hurdles at the ballot box for political advantage.
“They’re making it harder and harder to vote,” said Glenda Walker, 66, a Democrat who used a cane to make her way to a polling place in DeSoto, south of Dallas, Tuesday morning after choosing not to vote by mail. “But they’re not going to stop me from voting. Texas is too messed up and stuck on stupid. We need change.”
By late Tuesday, S.B. 1′s biggest impact appeared to be with mail balloting. County election officials across Texas have been reporting for days that they were rejecting as many as a third of the tens of thousands of mail ballots that have been streaming in for several weeks ahead of Election Day, with the overwhelming majority of them lacking the newly required identification number. It remained unclear Tuesday how many of those ballots would ultimately be accepted, because voters have six days after Election Day to return corrected ballots to their county election office.
In Republican-rich Southlake, northeast of Fort Worth, there was little concern that the state’s new voting regulations deterred anyone.
“Nobody is being kept from walking up these steps and voting today,” said Brian Clinkenbeard, 60, as he stood in a line wrapped around the second-floor lobby of City Hall. A ramp and elevator are available for those who can’t walk up steps, Clinkenbeard said.
“Everybody has an equal opportunity here, unless you read the press and they say you don’t,” he said.
In Texas, mail voting is limited to a narrow population including those who are 65 or older, disabled, or out of town on Election Day. While the number of rejected ballots is likely to reach into the tens of thousands, it represents a small percentage of the overall vote. In Harris County, for instance, home of Houston, roughly 178,000 voters cast ballots in early voting, and a similar number were expected to vote on Tuesday, while only about 37,000 had returned mail ballots. And nearly 11,000 of those mail votes had been flagged for identification errors, according to Leah Shah of the county elections office.
The new law requires voters who vote by mail to include a state identification or Social Security number inside the envelope flap used to return their ballot to their county election office. The number must match what’s on file with the voter’s registration record.
In Houston, some voters who turned out to vote in person lamented the elimination of drive-through voting and a 24-hour early-voting center, which S.B. 1 outlawed after they were offered in 2020 to give voters more options amid the pandemic.
“It’s just made it more inconvenient to vote,” said David Adler, 58, an attorney and Democrat who voted early on Friday in downtown Houston. “I liked the drive-in voting.”
One bright spot of the day was that turnout, while typically low for a midterm primary at midday Tuesday, appeared to be “holding steady” when compared with 2018, the most recent comparable election, according to Harris County elections administrator Isabel Longoria. Several voters interviewed at the polls Tuesday said they were determined not to allow the new restrictions to stop them from casting ballots.
“I’d rather wait here for as long as I have to,” said Marvin Robinson, 72, who was waiting in his van in DeSoto to vote curbside. Robinson said he and his wife never received mail ballots.
The primary also heralded the implementation of a new requirement that county election offices publish, on the night of the election, the number of voters who showed up to vote or were sent mail ballots, as well as the number of ballots cast. The data must be sorted by precinct.
Champions of the measure said it is a necessary act of transparency that will allow the public to scrutinize discrepancies and demand an accounting from election officials.
“In Harris County, in every election, we’ve had more ballots than voters,” said Alan Vera, who trains poll watchers for the Harris County GOP, in Houston. “Before Senate Bill 1, they did nothing. They just swept it under the rug. Now, if they’ve got a discrepancy, they have to call the secretary of state and say, ‘We have a problem.’ ”
County election officials disputed Vera’s characterizations and said there are a number of reasons the numbers don’t match. In some cases, voters check in to vote at a polling location and then walk out without casting a ballot, producing one more checked-in voter than ballot cast. In others, their names are not in the polling book and they must vote provisionally until election officials can verify that they are eligible to vote. That produces one more ballot than checked-in voter.
Polling books, which look like electronic tablets, also sometimes malfunction, requiring check-ins to be conducted by hand and meaning that the central office’s count of check-ins is not accurate until those names are recorded electronically, sometimes days later.
Publishing the raw numbers on election night — before the official canvass is complete — serves no purpose other than to create confusion, they said.
“To try to boil that down to one sheet of paper on election night with data that we know is going to change, and is supposed to change, because that’s how the process works, really does a disservice to voters and to the public looking at those numbers,” said Beth Stevens, voting director for Harris County. “It will potentially sow distrust in the work that we’re doing rather than shedding light.”
'You’re presenting unaudited numbers to the voters, without getting an opportunity to investigate or clarify,” said Remi Garza, the elections chief in Cameron County, home of Brownsville. Garza heads the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
An additional challenge, Garza and others said, was that the office of the Texas secretary of state did not provide instructions on how to follow the new reporting requirement until late last week.
Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Secretary of State John Scott (R), said the office has been sprinting since S.B. 1 was enacted in September to provide guidance to local election officials on a variety of new rules.
Taylor said the new election night reporting requirement “will introduce additional transparency and accountability” into reporting requirements. He noted that it will probably fall to the secretary of state’s office, along with local election officials, to help explain any discrepancies that emerge in the new reporting requirements.
“When people notice something doesn’t match up, there’s a tendency to say, ‘There was fraud. There was illegal activity. Something went wrong,' ” he said. “I think it’s on us, and on county officials, to explain why those discrepancies exist and reconcile those numbers in the final canvass report.”
Bettencourt hailed the requirement because, he said, “what gets measured gets fixed.”
Election officials had also braced for potential clashes between election workers and partisan poll watchers, who are newly empowered under S.B. 1 to stand as close as necessary “to see or hear” election activities. The law carries new criminal penalties for election workers who deny access to poll watchers — a provision that Democrats and voting rights advocates had decried as a license to intimidate voters and election workers as well as a disincentive to sign up to work the polls.
Those concerns were not fully tested on Tuesday, however. As a partisan primary, the day’s elections were staffed by the major parties’ county committees. And while a small number of poll watchers did observe election activities at scattered polling locations across the state, party officials said the real test of those provisions would come in November, when county election staffs run polling locations and when Republicans and Democrats are actually competing in individual contests.
“The primary is for practice, and then the midterms will be the real thing for most of our poll watchers,” said Vera, who led a poll worker training last Thursday at Harris County’s GOP headquarters in Katy, Tex. Fewer than 20 Republicans showed for Vera’s training, and across the state, more than 1,000 poll watchers took newly mandated state training entitling them to serve during the primary cycle. Harris County alone, the state’s most populous, has more than 300 polling places.
Still, election officials reported a smattering of clashes between poll watchers and election workers through two weeks of early voting and on Election Day. In Dallas during early voting last week, one poll watcher demanded to see the contents of a ballot box — the locked receptacle that paper ballots fall into after voters insert their ballots into optical scanning machines, said Dallas County’s elections chief, Michael Scarpello.
“That ballot box is not to be opened,” Scarpello said — and when it is, it is done with a Republican and a Democratic poll judge to witness and sign off on the transport of the ballots. Scarpello, who has administered elections in four states over his career, said Texas’s election laws were already, “by far,” the most difficult to administer and the most unfriendly to voters.
“Senate Bill 1 is just another brick in the wall,” he said.
Jack Douglas in Fort Worth, Mary Lee Grant in Kingsville, Tex., Matt Keyser in Conroe, Tex., and Annette Nevins in DeSoto, Tex., contributed to this report.