I saw this in the this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer, but I’m afraid that was paywalled, so I found another online source. Revealed: Texas threw out abnormally high number of votes in March primary | US voting rights | The Guardian
Not sure if this happened in Texas, but some locations even prohibited them from letting voters know that their ballot was discarded.
\textcolor{red}{\text{Well :duh: the addresses they have are for registered voters}}
\textcolor{red}{\text{If they thought the discarded ballot was from a registered voter,}}
\textcolor{red}{\text{surely they wouldn't discard it}}
\textcolor{red}{\text{I suppose they could alert the voter that someone tried to submit a fraudulent ballot }}
\textcolor{red}{\text{under their name}}
This could backfire enormously on Republicans.
It appeared that the reason these ballots were rejected was because they “didn’t comply with a new state law requiring mail voters to include personal identification numbers.”
voters have to provide a partial Social Security number or driver’s license number on their mail ballot application — as well as on the return envelope. And the ID number they provide has to match what’s on their voter registration record
Besides issues with matching ID numbers, there was also a big issue with voters flat out missing the ID portion of their ballot’s return envelope. The ID field was located under the envelope flap, which Davis said is easy to miss.
In Texas, only a sliver of the electorate is allowed to vote by mail, but absentee voting is often used by people for whom voting in person can be a challenge, including Texans with disabilities.
Only voters who are 65 or older automatically qualify for a mail-in ballot.
Nationwide, older people are more likely to identify as R or R-leaning than younger people. So the R legislature making it harder for people to vote by mail doesn’t look like a winner.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer article, which was my primary source, did not include that statement about “initial rejection”, which is in the linked Guardian article and in some other online articles. Some of them also indicated that some Texas jurisdictions made attempts to get the voters to fix their ballots (a situation Curious George mentioned as possible.) It’s also the case that some voters who didn’t vote by mail successfully voted in person.
Still, overall voter suppression seemed to work, even if not as well as the legislators had hoped.
Sure. Though AP is reported a 6% higher rejection rate in Biden counties here.
I am not sure if I read this about TX, but at least one state with new mail in requirements was trying to help the voters who cast unacceptable ballots cure them. But the problem was trying to get in touch with them and fixing stuff before time ran out.
This is a problem with mail-in voting in general. I saw it in Oregon all the time, especially with older people. They thought they’d voted and had no idea that their vote hadn’t counted.
It’s one of the reasons I’m opposed to mail-in voting other than when absolutely necessary. Early voting, yes. Mail-in voting, no.
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I don’t follow Twig. It’s usually more complicated to do anything by mail. I still am for people being able to use Amazon though.
I think the problem with mail-in voting is the lack of any real-time error correction routines. At the polls (here) you check-in and they tell you “ya, you’re registered here, take a ballot”, or “go to such and such precinct, you are registered there”, or “you can vote with a provisional ballot”. If you don’t fill ballot in properly, like no marks in any bubble, the scantron machine will reject.
Especially during a rules change, people who always did it the old way might not make the change to new rules. This takes a concerted outreach program by the SoS to explain the new rules.
Funny story I don’t know where to put, but it is voting related. My precinct is at my parish, and several of our parishioners volunteer to work at the precinct. A retired engineer who serves as our parish’s physical plant manager is one of the poll captains. My mom is in a group of knitters at the church that do baby blankets and stuff for charity. The guy comes in to a knitters meeting this week and offers voter registration card for anyone who need them and also offers a form for poll worker volunteers. One of the ladies, whom my mom describes as never laughing, never even smiling, (which would be tough because several of the group members are absolute cut-ups) but offers occasional deadpans, pipes up “No thanks, I do all my poll work at night”. Group totally loses it, and the guy just turns beet red and backs out of the room without saying a thing.
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I’m not sure where “voter suppression” shows up in this story.
Ballots not accepted for clear reasons; and reasons that were not hidden at the outset . . .
And this is for primaries; not electing anyone to a particular office.
I mean: While this problem might cause you and Twig to go in person, I don’t see why it should stop me from mail-in-voting.
Also, it’s sort of secondary. Like saying, “our biggest problem is contacting the millions of passengers whose luggage we lost.”
Yeah I would call it, successful test in voter suppression.
You could also just call it, a giant cluster****. If I send you a simple form to fill out, and you have a 10% chance of screwing it up, then it’s on me.
The clearest evidence that it is voter suppression and not merely an accident is the fact that the leaders aren’t fixing it.
We can’t search the AO to find if anyone posted “Voters were rejected for not paying poll taxes, and the requirement to pay poll taxes was never hidden”
The issue is that you are unaware that there’s a problem. You believe you’ve voted, but actually you haven’t. That can’t happen with just about anything else. Certainly not in person voting. If your signature doesn’t match in person or you brought the wrong kind of ID or you showed up to the wrong precinct you are aware there’s a problem and usually you know in enough time to fix the problem or at least vote using a provisional ballot (if you’re at the wrong location right before polls close, for example).
If you think you’ve placed an order on Amazon but didn’t, you’ll figure it out eventually when you don’t get your order and your credit card is never charged.
I’ve spoken with numerous voters who believed they’d been voting for years but they hadn’t. Because their signature changed (often after a stroke) and so the elections office was consistently throwing out their ballots. They had no idea that they weren’t actually voting.
That is voter suppression at its finest. Make people think they’re voting when they’re not.
I have more objections to vote-by-mail that I’ve probably outlined elsewhere on GoA, and certainly outlined on AO. That’s just one of my objections. But it’s a significant one.
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Well, for the most part. You might accidentally vote for Pat Buchannan.
Okay, I suppose if this is really widespread. My sister’s signature was rejected last election. She was informed both by mail and internet with time to fix.
Yes, I agree that it shouldn’t stop you from using mail-in as an option. I don’t think that mail-in should be the only option unless a voter can check whether their vote has been counted as a minimum condition.
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That’s the problem with laws like this right? Sure they are intended to suppress the votes of certain communities, but they end up suppressing everyone’s vote so they are far less effective than anyone imagines them being. I really didn’t buy these measures would hurt Democrats as much as Democrats thought they would. I think they just hurt voters of all stripes which is bad in general.