Electoral College: Thoughts About the December 19 Presidential Election at the Texas Capitol
Monday the next POTUS will be elected
As the nation rumbles at a low boil, I’ve tried to summarize my thoughts about how, as 2016 draws to a close, voters seem to be more aware of (and more alarmed by and anxious about) our weird Electoral College. I mean weird as compared to the systems of other democracies across the planet.
In those other countries that choose their chief executive officers through a voting process, the highest offices are awarded via popular vote, but in the United States, the two chief executive offices are chosen by the votes cast by state-constituted panels of electors.
These panels are constituted and organized based on the result of statewide popular elections that take place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and in Texas, as in 47 of the other states, those panels are organized on a principle of “winner take all” based on whoever won a strict plurality of the state popular vote. The panels then meet and cast their ballots on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, which is the actual Presidential Election.
High levels of concern
This year, more than in 2000, 2004, 2008, or 2012, advocacy for dramatic reform in the constitutional process of Presidential elections has been loud and persistent.
The public level of concern regarding the Electoral College and the outcome of Monday’s vote has no direct historical parallel. The closest analogous election might be the 1876 presidential election, which in its divisiveness had raised concerns of a second Civil War (about that, see my historical note at the end of this post).
This previously unheard of public discourse—about “Hamiltonian electors” stepping up to exercise independent judgment and discretion to deny the office of presidency to an unfit candidate—is happening right now in a way different from the last 224 years of post-Twelfth Amendment Presidential contests because:
(1) There is a gap between the national popular vote, which favors Hillary Clinton by more than 2 percentage points, and the apportionment of electoral votes, which favors Donald Trump by a projected total of 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232.
(2) This is only the fifth time in more than 200 years in which the Electoral College vote has not reflected the popular vote. (The previous four occurrences were in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.)
(3) Trump is perceived by some conservative and most progressive voters to be unfit to serve (particularly as the Russia stories continue to pile up); and
(4) The anger of at least half the voters regarding (among other things) Mr. Trump’s nonexistent electoral mandate arguably exceeds in intensity and furor the amount of public scorn heaped on the winners of the 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 Presidencies—which I am shorthanding as “lame duckling Presidencies”—ugly duckling meets lame duck.
Save us, Electors, you’re our only hope!
Our Electoral College system has broken before, but arguably never so badly as it has this year. So now we have public pleas and hopeful invocations addressed to the members of the Electoral College to fix what many are calling our national mistake.
Many are asking the “Hamiltonian electors” to (in effect) mirror (or honor) the national popular vote. (The previous link is to the National Popular Vote initiative, a multistate legislative initiative to enact state laws that would enforce the selection and votes cast by state electors to conform to the national vote.)
To mirror the popular vote this Monday, 37 of the total 306 Republican electors would have to break their oaths to cast their ballots in favor of the candidates who won their state. The breach of tradition would be unprecedented.
Texas electors get a fair amount of attention on Monday because our state has a large population and a correspondingly large number of electors (38) out of the total of 538 electors. (The seeming correspondence between the number of Texas electors—38—and the margin of Mr. Trump’s expected Electoral College victory—37—is purely coincidental; each state’s electoral votes are calculated by counting up the number of Congressional delegates assigned to that state. Texas, with 36 members of the House of Representatives and two members of the Senate, gets 38 electors.)
If the electors in Texas were to vote proportionately in line with the popular vote in this state, 20 of the 38 votes would be for Trump (i.e., 52.23% of 38, rounded up), 16 would be for Hillary Clinton (43.24% of 38, rounded down), 1 would be for Gary Weld (3.16% of 38, rounded down) and the remainder (1 vote) would be for Jill Stein (.8% of 38, rounded up).
So … is that what’s going to happen?
Uh. No. There is simply too much institutional, cultural, and, perhaps, other pressure on the electors to conform to prior tradition.
While electors are typically invisible political party functionaries and fundraisers who never enter the public sphere, two of the Texas electors are in the national public spotlight. One has resigned because of a moral objection to casting his ballot for Trump, and the other has indicated that he will not vote for Trump on Monday.
So I predict that on Monday when the results are announced, the Texas electors will have maybe one dissenting ballot, and the dissenter (a Republican Party loyalist who was chosen for his position as an elector by the Trump campaign team when the campaign office filled out its paperwork for the election late last year) will almost certainly not cast his ballot for Hillary Clinton.
Why are people so angry about all this?
So … let’s go back to our lame duckling President, put in office through a circumstance where the Electoral College vote doesn’t match the popular vote. In this context, which I will term for convenience a “broken election,” the President is installed by the Electoral College, but the disparity between the popular vote and the Electoral College outcome frustrates the will of those whose preferred candidate won the popular vote.
The reason why this election presents such a risk and challenge to our nation is different from (and worse than) than our previous “broken” elections for at least two reasons — the Russian interference (more on that here and here — but also, for balance, see The Nation‘s critique, here) and the growing evidence that the President-elect is so profoundly unsuited to hold office.
Compare Donald Trump to the four other winners of the Electoral College who were also losers of the popular vote :
- George W. Bush — At the time of his Electoral College victory in 2000, Bush was the elected governor of Texas; while he was admittedly a policy lightweight, he had, by his duties of office, engaged in the basic functions of government oversight, such as legislative review, public speaking, policy analysis, staff management, and constituent services.
- Benjamin Harrison — At the time of his Electoral College victory in 1888, Harrison had represented the State of Ohio in the United States Senate for roughly one full term; while he had previously made unsuccessful runs for state office in Ohio, he was familiar with parliamentary procedure, bill drafting and analysis, the budget process, public speaking, staff management, and constituent services.
- Rutherford B. Hayes — Before he became President in 1876, Hayes was the elected governor of Ohio; while he (like George W. Bush) was a policy lightweight, he had proven himself to be a popular state executive officer with prior experience in government operations.
- John Quincy Adams — At the time of his election in 1824, Adams was the Secretary of State; while he had not previously been elected to an executive office, he had a lifetime of international diplomatic and government service under his belt, was supremely well-educated, and was a noted jurist, writer, and public speaker.
Neither Bush, nor Harrison, nor Hayes, nor Adams were as ensnared by financial conflicts of interest as Trump is, nor (arguably) were any of them as inexperienced and disinterested as Trump appears to be in essential principles of foreign policy, domestic administration, and actual governance — not to mention political checks and balances and other basic concepts of American constitutional law.
So there are broken Presidential elections, and then there is 2016. That’s why people are so upset; in his recent editorial in the Atlantic, James Fallows eloquently explains the foundations of despair.
What about the prospects of an electoral college revolt?
I have mentioned in a previous post that Professor Lawrence Lessig has published an idealistic constitutional argument as to why the members of the Electoral College should not cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
In advocating this course of action, Professor Lessig finds himself in the swelling ranks of a number of legal experts and public service professionals who similarly see the 2016 election as the most serious political crisis of our lifetime, and who additionally see a repudiation of Trump in the Electoral College vote as the only way we can save ourselves from disaster.
But people who suggest this revolt face a steep uphill climb, and not just because of tradition. An “exciting” December 19th Presidential Election creates two problems:
(1) Challenges to the Electoral College erode public faith in the process of the smooth and non-violent transition of power from one government to another. The Electoral College may be a stupid and weird procedural step, prone to this kind of brokenness, but it’s what we expect and are used to.
(2) The challenge to the expected Electoral College outcome is almost instantly reframed by supporters of Donald Trump as a petulant bad-faith refusal on the part of Clinton supporters to play the game by the rules as written.
What the most hard-core Trump supporters need to acknowledge is that a broken election has subtle but important negative consequences for the winner of that election.
By failing to address the valid concerns of voters who favored the candidate who won the popular vote, the winning candidate makes the country more ungovernable.
All the winners of the previous “broken” Presidential elections faced this problem. Neither George W. Bush, nor Benjamin Harrison, nor Rutherford Hayes, nor John Q. Adams had as free a hand with the management of their administration as they would have if they hadn’t been elected with a metaphorical asterisk next to their names, and they had to accommodate this political reality. They all had to reach across the aisle.
And these historical loser-winners of the Presidential prize at least had some capacity (based on their own education, experience or sociopolitical awareness) to achieve this accommodation of their political reality.
In contrast, and heightening our fears for the future, Donald Trump seems emotionally and temperamentally unfit for the office, and we are worried (and I’m including myself in that “we”) that he cannot or does not know how to win—and more importantly, how to govern—with grace and a spirit of compromise.
Realistically, is Donald Trump going to get his 270 electoral votes on Monday? Yeah. I think so.
Whether or not he does, though, the only way we all get out of this intact is if he accepts the idea of a more blended power-sharing government than the one he erroneously believes and says that he has a mandate for.
HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE
Let’s consider the candidates and issues involved in those four previous broken presidential elections, and see how those elections compare to 2016.
1. THE FOUR WAY SCRAPE OF 1824
In the only election determined in the House of Representatives following a failure by any candidate to receive a majority Electoral College vote, John Quincy Adams was elected over his nearest rival (and the winner of the national popular vote), Andrew Jackson.
The election marked the dissolution of the riven and internally fractured single-party system that had existed roughly since the War of 1812, and signaled the reemergence of a two-party system that would win Jackson the presidency in 1828.
There were four strong regional candidates for President, all running on the same party ticket, and all of whom won at least two states. With such a diffuse and fractured election, it wasn’t surprising that none of the candidates won a simple majority of the popular vote or the needed 131 electoral votes; Jackson came closest with 41.4% (and 99 electoral votes), Adams had 30.9% (and 84 electoral votes), Clay had 13% (and 37 electoral votes) and Crawford had 11.2% (and 41 electoral votes). By the terms of the Twelfth Amendment, Jackson, Adams, and Crawford, as the top three electoral vote winners, would be elected by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote.
Voters who favored Jackson were not happy that their chosen candidate was “robbed” of office by the House of Representatives; Henry Clay, as Speaker of the House, threw his legislative support to Adams in return for a cabinet position; this “corrupt bargain” gave fuel to Jackson’s supporters to engage in four years of running political warfare with the Adams administration.
In contrast to 2016, all four of the candidates running for President in 1824 possessed reasonably strong political pedigrees, education, and experience for public office.
Adams was Secretary of State, and as the son of President John Adams, he had spent his formative years in overseas diplomatic postings, spoke multiple European languages fluently, negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, was an accomplished scholar and writer, and a witty, thoughtful and erudite expert on international law and relations.
Jackson was a U.S. Senator, the former military governor of Florida, and a nationally famous military strategist and hero following the Battle of New Orleans.
Crawford was the Secretary of the Treasury, former Secretary of War, former U.S. Senator and President Pro Tempore, and former state legislator with a lifetime of public service and legal experience.
Henry Clay was the Speaker of the House, having had a long career and influential career in Congress and previously in state government as a powerful and skilled orator and legislative expert.
As hard as these candidates fought with each other, and as bitter as the 1824 election may have been, none of these four potential Commanders-in-Chief had political or personal baggage that could be compared to Trump’s “negatives.”
To the extent that the election in February 1825 in the House of Representatives was constitutionally fraught, it was because Clay bargained for a cabinet position because he hated Jackson, not because the integrity of the election process was tainted by foreign interference.
2. THE SHAME OF 1876
In the shadow of the Civil War, violence against black voters and rampant corruption in the Ulysses Grant administration came the 1876 contest between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, the most serious post-Civil War constitutional crisis the United States has ever experienced, and one which came dangerously close to reigniting open warfare and rebellion over the unsatisfied grievances of defeated Southern pro-slavery sympathizers.
This was an election so fraught with connivance and error that all we know for sure is that Tilden won the popular vote, probably as the consequence of intense and violent suppression of the black vote in Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida; of the electoral votes, 20 remain intractably indeterminate (partly because executive control of the state electoral colleges was disputed in a number of states and two sets of electoral returns were submitted by the governments of Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida).
In January of 1877, Congress passed a law creating a bipartisan Electoral Commission to award the missing electoral votes. Armed conflict seemed likely, and military defenses were strengthened around Washington D.C.; ultimately, Hayes was granted the 20 missing electoral votes in return for a compromise where Congress ended military oversight and removed federal troops from former Confederate states.
Hayes as governor of Ohio was the less well-known candidate, and was widely regarded as having a fairly thin resume of government experience. Nevertheless, he had served with distinction in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and was a popular executive officer in his home state.
Tilden, as governor of New York, was much more well known nationally as a “good government” reformer, and as the prosecutor who had cleaned out the corruption in Tammany Hall.
But as weak (in terms of public perception or media attention) as Hayes may have been compared to Tilden, he was an elected public official with experience as a state executive officer, and hardly comparable to a failed real estate mogul without any prior knowledge or understanding of government.
3. THE DIRTY SQUEAKER OF 1888
In the 1888 election, the incumbent Grover Cleveland won 48.6% of the popular vote to Benjamin Harrison’s 47.8%. Harrison nevertheless won the Presidency by a combination of hard campaigning in key states and the help of a corrupt New York political machine. Cleveland in effect lost his home state and the advantage of incumbency by failing to counter Harrison’s machine.
While Harrison was not a particularly strong candidate (in terms of the qualifications of experience) in comparison to a sitting President, he was a member of the U.S. Senate with a long record of public service.
4. FLORIDA, 2000
In the 2000 election, Al Gore won 48.4% of the popular vote to George W. Bush’s 47.9%, but lost by a thin, hanging chad of electoral votes in large part because of a partisan U.S. Supreme Court decision to foreclose further review of the Florida electoral process in the face of an extremely close statewide vote tally.
Given the recentness of the 2000 broken election, and the untidiness and unseemly way in which the 2000 election was resolved, voters who are upset with the 2016 election are making frequent references to the 2000 election, seeking parallels and citing the election for its relevance to the question of constitutional reform of the presidential election process.
In one sense, 2000 wasn’t as messy as 1876; the 2ooo election involved a systemic failure of election procedures in just a couple of states, and there was no credible risk that the Civil War would be reignited. Though violence and intimidation were certainly present in Florida during the abortive recount process, the risk of a nation-wide military conflict was essentially nonexistent.
And in another sense, 2000 wasn’t as messy as 2016; while the winning candidate had a weak résumé in comparison to that of the incumbent Vice President, at the time of his election he held office as the elected chief executive officer of a populous state.
Professor Lawrence Lessig & Team Offering Free Confidential Legal Advice For Presidential Electors
My wife asked about The Electors Trust, a group of lawyers offering “free and strictly confidential legal support to any Elector who wishes to vote their conscience,” and so at her suggestion, I’m posting the link for its relevance to the Texas electors.
And here’s Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig’s article explaining how the Electors Trust works, and what his intentions are in offering this advice.
I’m still working through my own thoughts regarding the Electoral College, so-called “faithless electors,” and our oddly structured Presidential elections, and will take some time to unpack them in a (very near) future post.
#Trump’s Twitter Problem: Life In “Post-Truth” America
Our presumptive President-Elect chose to take time out from his Sunday (November 27) to inform us via Twitter (with no evidence) that millions of people voted illegally, and that but for those illegal votes, he would have won the popular vote nationally. (As of this writing Hillary Clinton is more than 2,200,000 ballots ahead of Trump in the popular vote).
To repeat: Mr. Trump made this statement based on absolutely no evidence, and in the teeth of overwhelming rebutting evidence that what he has said is simply and unequivocally false.
Not to mention that he has in the space of a couple of inflammatory Tweets managed to insult the professionalism and intelligence of every county and state voter registrar, election worker, poll watcher, precinct judge, county elections board member, and state election officer in the country, not to mention every—or at least 3 million—of us voters.
If this is what we have to look forward to for the next four years, the ratings for Trump’s reality TV version of the federal government should be through the roof, right? So at least we have that going for us. It’s obscene—if understandable; this is the PEOTUS, after all— that this story got any traction at all.
But first, given that in my last post I opined that the Clinton campaign would be unlikely to seek recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and given that events have proven my opinion to be wrong, let’s address the decision by the Clinton campaign to piggyback on the Jill Stein campaign’s recount requests.
General counsel to Hillary for America Marc Elias (via a statement posted on Medium, and as quoted extensively in Rick Hasen’s blog) makes it clear that Hillary Clinton is wholly realistic about the likelihood that the recounts will not change the outcome of the election, but that such recounts should prove useful as audits of the accuracy and integrity of the election process and to settle fears regarding the risks of result-changing “hacks.”
Briefly, the Clinton campaign would not have pursued recounts but for the fact that
(1) The Stein campaign raised the money and filed the paperwork to get the ball rolling, and
(2) Voters were collectively so disturbed and agitated by evidence of foreign meddling and interference in the election that it made sense for the Clinton campaign to join in the recount effort in order to bring closure to the election.
So why did Stein’s campaign ask for recounts in the first place?
I don’t know—I guess it’s possible that the Stein campaign coordinated with the Clinton campaign, but that seems unlikely, given that neither campaign will benefit in any direct political way from behind-the-scenes cooperation.
I suspect that the Stein recount was motivated by no more than what it seems to be on its face—a grassroots-driven gift propelled by very real and understandable anxiety on the part of committed Stein supporters who could not have been happy with the idea of a Trump victory, especially if it was the result of some sort of direct interference or manipulation of the vote totals in key precincts.
Finally, Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has written a nice summary explanation as to why Russia benefits—at least in the short term—from all this anxiety.
Kudos to KTRE (Nacogdoches) For Explaining Why The November 2016 Election Won’t Be Rigged
I. PRAISE WHERE PRAISE IS DUE
Great in-depth political reportage is not easy — and it is a hard thing for any journalist to write compellingly about the quotidian mechanisms of democracy, as opposed to the comparatively simpler narrative about candidates winning and losing.
And when election experts assert that (Donald Trump’s tweets notwithstanding), there is no way for the presidential election to be rigged with fake votes, voter impersonation, people voting as dead voters, illegal voters, etc., the technical reasons for those assertions are sometimes glossed (or glazed, as in glazed eyes) over.
Discussions of ballot security protocols, chain-of-custody documents, seal registers, and other voting safeguards are usually not what one would think of as making for compelling television journalism topics, which is a shame.
To the extent that the media fails to educate voters about how and why elections are secure, voter ignorance about election security can make voters vulnerable to fear-mongering.
Inasmuch as television news reporting is often negatively (and sometimes unfairly!) perceived as “shallow” and insubstantial, I think it’s important to call television news stations out for praise when they do a great job.
On October 20, 2016 (well before the beginning of the early voting period), KTRE TV (the ABC affiliate in Nacogdoches, Texas) ran a story by Thomas Hoce that effectively rebutted the “rigged election” falsehood with specific technical information supplied by interviews with Connie Brown, the Angelina County Elections Administrator, and Todd Stallings of the Nacogdoches County Elections office. My only editorial suggestion would be that titling the story as “East Texas election officials talk possibility of election rigging” was a little misleading and unfair.
I would have gone with something more like, “East Texas election officials debunk possibility of election rigging.”
Among other things, Mr. Stallings mentioned that in his county [and, I, the Texas Election Law Blogger, will add, and as is standard practice across Texas and the nation],
- the voting systems are not networked or connected to the internet, that
- the ballot tabulators are audited for accuracy before and after the ballot tabulations are run,
- that the State demands a “test” partial manual recount of ballots to test against the possibility of error,
- that the voting systems and tabulating equipment are secured with tamper-resistant seals, and
- that audit logs are maintained for each instance in which the election records are accessed.
On the one hand, nothing that Mr. Stallings said was particularly stunning or noteworthy —elections always produce a prodigious amount of redundant public security records and proof of veracity as part of the statutorily required audit trail.
But (outside of election workers and a few interested officials and academics) journalists rarely include a description of this audit trail as part of a routine dinnertime local television news story about the election. So kudos to KTRE and Thomas Hoce for having aired some of the procedural reasons why the election won’t be—in fact, can’t be—”rigged.”
II. PLAYING ON VOTER FEARS
And now for some criticism. Whereas one TV station in a comparatively small East Texas market did an admirable brief story quelling election fears, TV stations in the much larger Austin market (FOX7 News Austin , KEYE, and KVUE) ran stories on October 19th that might have exacerbated voter anxieties unnecessarily.
Two years ago, a woman named Laura Pressley lost a hard-fought bid to be elected to a seat on the Austin city council; she subsequently filed an election contest asserting that the way in which electronic votes were preserved and tabulated after the election materially affected the outcome of the election.
Her argument was that because early votes cast on electronic machines were not reproduced in hard copy prior to Election Day, they could not be manually recounted and compared against a pre-Election Day partial tally. (The candidate made this assertion because she had done relatively well in early voting, but lost based on Election Day turnout, and believed that the divergent trends suggested irregularity.)
Given that Pressley’s contesting of the 2014 election results had been dismissed by the trial court for lack of evidence, one might wonder what change of circumstance made her story newsworthy on October 19 of this year, when her allegations were run under the headline, “Texas election integrity questioned.”
The implication from the story is that the State of Texas is doing something suspicious by granting waivers to some counties that release those counties from the obligation to do mandatory partial manual counts of optical scan ballots.
It’s an odd irrelevancy, given that
- (1) Laura Pressley’s 2014 election didn’t have any optical-scan ballots, and so the State waiver she describes is unconnected to her election contest; and
- (2) the State’s waiver is a specific response to the way in which certain brands of optical scanners of marked paper ballots (mechanically similar to the scanners used to tabulate multiple-choice tests) accumulate and preserve precinct-by-precinct early voting and Election Day vote totals.
A better headline for this story could have been, “Two years later, losing candidate still thinks she shouldn’t have lost.”
Of the three versions of Ms. Pressley’s “Election Integrity Story” that ran in the Austin market, the KVUE version contained the most explanatory context, including a rebuttal and criticism of alarmist talk about election fraud, and a reminder that widespread fears of election “rigging” are unfounded. The FOX7 version of the story was the shortest and least critical of its source, and omitted key information that would have placed Ms. Pressley’s complaints in context.
III. ARE ELECTION PROCEDURES TOO BORING TO MAKE GOOD NEWS?
Eh … I’m biased against saying that election procedures are “boring.” TV news producers face tremendous time limitations when trying to explain a complicated story, and election law is complicated; there’s no getting around that.
But elections are exciting, and election security should (or could) be described in a compelling way. And I think there’s a public benefit to be gained from airing news stories that give election administration a wider audience.
Ari Berman & Others on Texas Voter Registration and Jim Crow: tl;dr: Racism, Recalcitrance, Restrictions
The Nation’s Ari Berman has posted a number of must–read stories over the last few weeks regarding the 2016 election cycle.
Although Mr. Berman’s recent election stories have been been national in scope (he’s examining violations of voting rights in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio, among other places) his cover story for this week’s issue specifically focuses on the State of Texas’s discriminatory voter I.D. law and our restrictive voter registration laws.
Berman’s coverage in The Nation‘s cover story, “Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook” spotlights the restrictions on volunteer deputy voter registrars (or “VDRs”).
The story also looks at threats by some Texas officials to investigate voters who lack the narrow range of acceptable forms of photo I.D. required under the State’s 2011 voter I.D. law that was struck down in July of this year as racially discriminatory.
From the cover story in the October 31, 2016, issue of The Nation:
“VDRs [Volunteer Deputy Registrars] were established in 1985, but the restrictions on voter registration were significantly toughened by the Texas legislature in 2011 to require county trainings, ban non-Texans, and prohibit VDRs from being compensated based on the number of people they register. As a result, ‘Texas is the most restrictive state in the union when it comes to voter registration,’according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.”
I’ve written about these matters here, here, here, here, and, most recently, here, so its good to see these problems getting wider national attention.
***
A bit more on selected links included in this post:
Ari Berman’s Twitter feed is a good source of links not only to Mr. Berman’s own journalism, but also to other materials relating to civil rights and voting rights issues generally: https://twitter.com/AriBerman
The Nation—launched July 1865, so it’s covered a few elections in its time—has had excellent reporting and opinion pieces on the national elections: https://www.thenation.com.
My source for the text of provisions from Chapters 63 and 13 of the Texas Election Code (relating to voter I.D. and volunteer deputy voter registrar laws respectively) is the Texas Legislature Online: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us funded by us, the people of the great state of Texas.
Texas Voter ID Troubles Continue; District Court Orders Judicial Oversight of Texas Voter Education – And the State Doubles Down By Disparaging the Motives Of Voters Who Claim Not To Have Photo I.D.
I. APPARENTLY, THE STATE CAN SCRUTINIZE VOTERS WHO SUBMIT DECLARATIONS OF REASONABLE IMPEDIMENT IN LIEU OF PHOTO ID
On September 22, 2016, the Texas House of Representatives Elections Committee conducted a routine interim hearing on various technical matters relating to election administration. For three and a half hours the committee members and witnesses discussed proposed legislative tweaks to the petition signature process, to municipal elections, to obligation bonds and taxes, and so on. You can watch the whole hearing if that’s your thing, but for my money the really interesting stuff doesn’t come up until the very end of the hearing.
As the hearing wrapped up, State Representative Celia Israel asked an official from the Texas Secretary of State’s office about a court order that had been issued two days prior to the committee hearing. In particular, Representative Israel was curious to find out what the State was doing to educate voters about I.D. requirements for the November 8, 2016, election.
In response to the questions, Director of Elections Keith Ingram explained that the State had incorporated the text of the court’s most recent directive into the website and upcoming print and media advertising; he specified that voters who “do not possess [the statutorily mandated forms of photo I.D.] and cannot reasonably obtain it,” could cast a regular ballot by completing a “Declaration of Reasonable Impediment,” if they also supplied alternate forms of documentary evidence of their identity.
Representative Mike Schofield then took the discussion in a new direction (starting at the 3 hour, 36 minute mark), after asking if the State could track information about whether the Declarations were submitted by people who actually have I.D.:
What I don’t want to see is a gross number, and everybody acts as if those people don’t have I.D…. If you pretend you don’t have it, and use one of these declarations, that’s illegal, isn’t it?
In response to the question, Mr. Ingram clarified that voters entitled to use the Declaration would be those who had either never been issued one of the six forms of photo I.D. listed under the law, or those whose previously issued I.D.s had been lost or destroyed, and who had a reasonable impediment to replacing the missing I.D.
Representative Israel raised a hypothetical situation (described starting at 3 hours 45 minutes) in which a voter’s “reasonable impediment” is that the voter is voting at a polling place on one end of town, but left her photo I.D. at home, at the other end of town.
In that circumstance, Mr. Ingram explained that assuming that the voter filled out the “Declaration” and wrote down that the reasonable impediment was “left my I.D. at home,” the election worker would have to take the declaration at face value and allow the voter to cast a ballot.
Representative Schofield seemed incredulous, asking, “Is that … is that correct? … You’re going to let them vote with a ‘Reasonable Impediment?'”
The Director of Elections responded:
The poll worker cannot challenge the ‘Reasonable Impediment’ asserted by the voter. …. But if that’s the reasonable impediment, I think the voter is at risk, because they’re not following the law. But that’s not for the poll worker to decide. [Emphasis added by me.]
Committee vice-chair Craig Goldman then asked, “But, how does that get challenged, and then how is their vote null and void?”
The Director of Elections explained:
The vote will never be null and void. It’ll get challenged in an election contest, if it’s a close election. And obviously these things [the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment] will be available for folks to give to their district attorneys to follow up on. [Emphasis added by me.]
Representative Schofield pressed the issue as the hearing entered its final minutes (at the 3 hour 46 minute mark):
I realize we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes and a lot of fraudulent votes. That’s why we have voter I.D. My concern is that there are going to be a lot of people trying to thwart the [voter I.D.] law who have valid drivers’ licenses; who have passports; and are going to assert these declarations. Their votes may count in this election, but I want to make sure that when we go back to court, we’re not saying ‘oh, there’s this huge number of people that filed these declarations.’ I want to drill down and find out which one of ’em [declarations] were bogus. [Emphasis added by me.]
The Director of Elections responded, “And I’ll think you’ll be able to tell easily.” He then went on describe how one of the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment that had already been used in an off-season tax ratification election indicated that one voter had written that the “reasonable impediment” was “fascist law.”
The committee chair said: “Fascist law? They wrote that?”
***
What’s troubling about the exchange (aside from Representative Schofield’s counterfactual and inflammatory assertion that there’s going to be a lot of “fraudulent votes” in this election), and what should be especially troubling to the plaintiffs in the voter I.D. lawsuit, is the implication—encouraged both by Representative Schofield’s assertion that “we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes,” and by the response from the Director of Elections that voters who use the Declaration can be tracked, and possibly referred to local district attorneys for prosecution for illegal voting—that voting without an approved photo I.D. is automatically suspect.
So … why is this suggestion of potential criminal prosecution troubling?
Because it is not a stretch to imagine that statements like this could have a chilling effect — dissuading eligible, qualified voters without approved photo I.D. from voting. In other words, threatening to investigate voters who file a Reasonable Impediment Declaration could end up hurting the very group of voters that the August 10, 2016, court order was intended to help.
Think I’m exaggerating about “threatening to investigate”?
On September 9, 2016, Rick Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, posted a story on his Election Law Blog about the motion for enforcement of the August 10 court order filed by the private (non-Department of Justice) plaintiffs in Veasey v. Perry. These plaintiffs were reacting to this August 26, 2016, news story (as quoted in the private plaintiff’s motion):
[Harris County Clerk Stan] Stanart says he will investigate everyone who signs that form to assure they are not lying. Whether anything happens, that’s up to the [Harris County District Attorney’s Office]. But after the votes are counted and the election ends, Stanart said his office will be checking to see whether a person who signed the sworn statement has a Texas Department of Public Safety-issued ID through the DPS database.” Meagan Flynn, Harris County Clerk Will Vet Voters Who Claim to Lack Photo ID, HOUSTON PRESS, Aug. 26, 2016.
So to recap: As of late August in a presidential election year, the chief election official in Harris County, the most heavily populated county in Texas, was quoted as intending to investigate voters who claim they lack photo I.D.s.
That threat of punitive or retributive investigation prompted the federal district court in Corpus Christi to issue on September 20 a legal order, in which the court told the State to clarify and make explicit that voters who reasonably lacked photo I.D. were legally entitled to an alternate method of qualifying for a regular ballot.
But then in the hearing on September 22, just two days after the court order, the State was still discussing the option of criminal investigations and prosecutions of voters without photo I.D.s, in order to satisfy a Republican state legislator’s concerns about the effective enforcement of the State’s photo I.D. law.
And the statements of the Director of Elections reassuring Representative Schofield that voters who vote without photo I.D. can be tracked and investigated echoed the statements made in August by Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.
II. BACKGROUND — WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT “REASONABLE IMPEDIMENT”?
After the conservative Fifth Circuit appellate bench ruled that the State of Texas had enacted a discriminatory voter I.D. law, the federal district court in Corpus Christi that has been handling the photo I.D. suit (Veasey v. Perry) issued a judicial order on August 10, 2016, to remedy the immediate effects of the discriminatory law.
The plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit relating to voter I.D. then filed a motion informing the district court judge that the state’s officials were misrepresenting the court’s directive. (see, e.g., the Texas Tribune‘s September 7, 2016, story).
The August 10 judicial order had provided that voters who could not “reasonably” obtain an acceptable form of photo I.D. could substitute the use of some other forms of identification if they completed a “declaration of reasonable impediment.” The Elections Division at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not include the word “reasonably” in training materials, the agency’s website, and voter information posters, leaving the impression that the only voters who could access alternative forms of identification were those who were absolutely unable to get the photo I.D.
Omitting the word “reasonably,” which had been specifically included in the district court’s August 10 judicial directive, may seem like a minor editorial alteration. But in making that omission, the State gave the plaintiffs the impression that State officials were dragging their feet in response to the August 10 court order.
The Department of Justice summarized the problem in its September 6, 2016, motion to enforce the August 10, 2016, remedial order as follows:
The District Court responded as follows (from the September 20, 2016, court order):
REGISTER TO VOTE BY OCTOBER 11, 2016, TO VOTE IN THE NOVEMBER 8, 2016, ELECTION
If you want to vote in the November 8, 2016, general election, you must register to vote by no later than Tuesday, October 11, 2016.
(If you are already registered to vote, then going to one of these sites will help you verify that you are registered.
For instance. My highly politically opinionated wife (hint: not a Trump supporter) just realized she doesn’t know where her 2016 voter registration card is. Cobbler’s family. No shoes.)
See: http://www.votetexas.gov/register-to-vote and http://www.lwvtexas.org.