By Li Lovett
Contributing Writer
“Mass confusion.” That’s how a Texas county judge described the state’s March 3 primaries after hundreds of Democratic voters found themselves turned away from their polling stations and sent to other locations as a result of Republican-driven changes to voting procedures.
After a district judge ordered Dallas county polling stations to stay open for an additional two hours (up to 9 p.m.) to address the disruption, a decision by the Texas Supreme Court to overturn that ruling meant that votes cast after the 7 p.m. cut off would not be counted.
The incident fits a broader pattern that voting rights experts say could disenfranchise millions of voters across the country as the Trump administration seeks to gain control over elections.
“They are efforts to make it more difficult for people to vote, and certainly target communities of color, but also low-income communities,” said retired FBI agent and former Brennan Center fellow Mike German.
Reporting suggests the Trump administration is circulating a draft executive order that would give Trump emergency executive powers in the upcoming midterm elections. The order could potentially require all voters to show a photo ID to cast a ballot, also banning mail-in ballots which have been a mainstay of voting processes for decades.
At the same time, the president is also pushing Republican lawmakers to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of citizenship and voter identification at the polls. Trump posted on social media that he would not sign any pending legislation until the SAVE Act was passed, adding the law would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.
Polling shows Democrats are favored to win the House, with a more narrow pathway to the Senate.
Supporters argue measures like Voter ID laws are necessary to secure against election fraud, an issue the president has long put at the center of his campaign strategy. “Why would anybody not want voter ID? One reason: because they want to cheat,” said Trump in his State of the Union speech.
Thirty-six states currently request or require that voters show some form of ID when casting a ballot. A Pew Survey from last year found a large majority of Americans (83%) also back requiring some form of government issued ID when voting.
But evidence of actual fraud is sparse, affecting just 0.00004% of ballots cast. And even in those cases, voter ID laws do little to mitigate the problem.
At the same time, evidence shows that Voter ID laws substantially widen the voter turnout gap between white voters and voters of color, particularly younger voters of color.
German likens the Republican push for tighter election laws — including ending mail-in ballots and more limited polling stations — to Jim Crow-era policies such as poll taxes instituted by southern states.
“I don’t think as much has changed as we want to believe,” he said.
Adding to these concerns are demands by the Justice Department for access to voter records from at least 48 other states and Washington, D.C., including voter registration lists and ballots from previous elections.
After the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigrant agents in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter demanding that Minnesota turn over its voter rolls, invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1960 in federal inspections of state voter data.
Twenty-nine states and Washington, D.C, have been sued for not complying with Department of Justice demands.
All of this comes as the FBI continues to probe voter records in states including Georgia and Arizona as the agency seeks evidence of fraud as part of President Trump’s false assertion that he won the 2020 election.
Dan Vicuña, senior policy director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, says the level of access to voter information being sought by the Department of Justice would give the administration the means to throw eligible voters off the rolls based on clerical errors that could be easily fixed.
Because updates to the federal government’s data often lags that of the states, determinations of voter eligibility could be based on faulty information, he explained.
“The authority to vacuum up all this data … has never been sought before,” said Vicuña, noting that it’s a trove of data with voters’ names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.
Common Cause has filed motions to intervene in 15 of the 29 states being sued by the Department of Justice.
In mid-January, a US District Court judge ruled in favor of California, noting in the motion to dismiss that “the right to vote was won through generations of sacrifices from marginalized communities the American political system devalued, but who were determined to make the promise of democracy real.”
Judges have also dismissed Department of Justice lawsuits filed against three other states, Michigan, Oregon, and Georgia, though a new complaint has been filed in the latter case.
Vicuña described the lawsuits as “wasting taxpayer dollars,” adding that naturalized citizens are among those likely to be thrown off voter rolls, in addition to low-income people, renters, and students.
According to Jami Bertrand, co-founder of the Fort Bend Voter Education Coalition in southeast Texas, these same groups are the very ones most impacted by changes to local election laws in the state.
Last year, Republican election officials in Dallas County decided not to run joint polling sites with Democrats as had been done in numerous prior election cycles. Instead of being able to vote at countywide polling places, voters were required to go to neighborhood-based precincts instead of county voting centers where any voter in the county could vote. These changes were finalized less than two weeks before election day.
Adding to the confusion, the county’s election website crashed as voters sought to confirm where the new polling stations were located. Voting hours were extended on election day in response, though Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — currently running for the U.S. Senate — appealed to the state supreme court, which ruled to set the ballots aside.
Hundreds of Texas voters now worry their ballots won’t be counted.
Bertrand says in addition to the confusion, voters were unnerved at being asked to identify their party preference when requesting their ballots. She also noted the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at several polling stations in Dallas and neighboring Williamson counties, though that has not been independently confirmed.
“The people who are left out of the process here are minorities,” she said of changes to local election law, adding, “And I want to say, young minorities … are being discouraged from voting.”
Li Lovett is a writer for American Community Media
