Home » Posts tagged 'criticism of voter i.d.'
Tag Archives: criticism of voter i.d.
On the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act – A New Study from Rice University Corroborates the Damage Caused By the Photo I.D. Law
Not that anyone should be surprised, but there’s this:
One nice thing about this study is the timing, given the work that now needs to be done to judicially reform Texas voting laws. With this study, the plaintiffs in Veasey v. Perry should be able to help the Federal district court judge get over the hurdle placed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. This evidence helps reinforce the trial court’s previous ruling holding that the State intentionally discriminated against minority voters.
Partial Vindication – Texas Voter I.D. Law Held to Violate Voting Rights Act
Here’s Rick Hasen’s analysis on this breaking story. I find it troubling that the 5th Circuit remanded on the question as to whether the Texas picture I.D. law had a racially discriminatory purpose. Still, it’s at least a nail in the coffin of one of the worst voter suppression laws in the country.
Notice anything strange about these websites?
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/index.shtml
That’s right – there’s not the slightest mention of the 5th Circuit’s decision. That’s quite a contrast from back when Shelby County v. Holder came out; (within two hours of that decision two years ago, there were notices plastered all over the Secretary of State’s website announcing that the State was doubling down on its special brand of violating voter’s rights and instantly applying the discredited voter ID law).
If a voter relied on the Texas Secretary of State’s website for information, they would think that it was all business as usual; http://www.votetexas.gov informs voters that a “picture I.D. is now required to vote.”
But you say, “Well, Joe, that’s kind of unfair. I mean … there’s all that HTML coding to do, and it’s after business hours, and …”
The decision came out at lunchtime. That’s six hours ago.
After all, the Texas Attorney General had time to put something up on that agency’s website.
What the … ? “Texas Voter ID Law to Remain In Effect”
Oh my god.
That’s embarrassing.
That’s really embarrassing.
I guess the A.G. takes the position that because the 5th Circuit remanded on the issue of intentional discrimination, the fact that the court upheld the trial court determination that the law is freakin’ illegal and unenforceable is somehow sprinkled with magic appellate fairy dust.
Then again, the following disclaimer should be prominently displayed and attached to all press statements made by the Texas Attorney General.
“Please note that the opinions of the Attorney General are those of an individual currently under indictment for three felonies involving acts of intentional fraud. Therefore, proceed with caution.”
Some thoughts on the eve of oral argument in Veasey v. Perry
As you may know, tomorrow (April 28), a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans will hear oral argument in Veasey v. Perry. Texas has appealed the trial court’s damning conclusion that the State had used its voter I.D. law to enact a deliberately racially discriminatory barrier to voting.
Back in March, as the April 1, 2015 deadline for its reply brief loomed, the State asserted that it would only need 11,500 words to successfully argue that its draconian picture I.D. law wasn’t targeting minorities. After all, it wouldn’t take much paper to say that Texas’ voter I.D. law is more universally and generally horrible than merely racist. It doesn’t just discriminate against protected racial and language minority groups – it also discriminates against elderly voters, student voters, the poor, voters with disabilities, and inconveniences or hinders voting in general for everyone.
And there’s the State’s argument on appeal – which I shall broadly and meanly paraphrase as follows. “This law is so bad, it can’t possibly have been motivated by mere racial animus. We just hate all voters.” (That’s actually the second part of the State’s argument. The first part is, “well … all the people who were disenfranchised should have just voted by mail.” Unfortunately for the State, that’s a terrible argument, in part because it violates equal-rights provisions of the 14th Amendment. In fact, it’s such a self-destructive “shot in the foot” argument that everyone else feels a little sorry for the State’s litigators for being forced to repeat it. I mean … they do know that equating voting by mail with in-person voting is sort-of cringe inducingly bad form in civil rights litigation, right?)
Embarrassingly, the powers-that-be at the Texas Solicitor-General’s office dawdled a bit over the crafting of their succinct brief, and accidentally filed it a few minutes after midnight on April 2nd. These things happen, and nobody (other than me) felt particularly inclined to capitalize on the minor technical error in order to gently ridicule the already hapless appellant.
On a more serious note, people interested in same-day coverage of tomorrow’s oral argument should contact Erik Opsal at the Brennan Center.
Erik Opsal
Communications Manager
646.292.8356
erik.opsal@nyu.edu
Finally, for a nice perspective on why the international reputation of the United States currently hangs in the balance over voting rights, here’s a nice paper by Patricia Broussard, published as part of a recent symposium on the Voting Rights Act conducted by the Journal of Race, Gender and Ethnicity. “Eviscerating the Voting Rights Act and Moral Authority: Freedom to Discriminate Comes With a Price” (Journal of Race, Gender and Ethnicity, Volume 7, No. 1, Fall 2015)
Reading the tea leaves – what do recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions bode for Texas elections?
Within the past week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant certiori to hear an appeal of a decision upholding Wisconsin’s appalling voter i.d. law, (Frank v. Walker) and just remanded two Alabama redistricting cases (Alabama Black Legislative Caucus et al. v. Alabama et al., linked with Alabama Democratic Conference et al., v. Alabama et al.) back to the lower courts on a 5-4 decision holding that the state legislature could not justify “packing” African-American voters into fewer districts on the basis that it was compelled to do so in order to comply with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Superficially, this seemed to be a bit of give-and-take when it came to voting rights, although the cases weren’t directly comparable on the facts or issues.
So, what do these decisions mean for (1) the Texas voter i.d. case (Veasey et al. v. Perry et al.), or (2) the Texas redistricting case (Perez et al. v. Texas)?
Answer: Not much either way. The Texas Legislature (bless its aggregated shriveled dignity) overreached far more aggressively on both voter i.d. laws and on redistricting than did any of the other states (with the possible exception of South Carolina, which seems to be giving us a run for the money on efforts to cement the title of “most regressed” when it comes to voting rights).
As a consequence, the Texas lawsuits present voting rights advocates with an interesting set of tactical choices. On the one hand, the State has been such a bad actor that it is absolutely imperative that its voter i.d. and 2013 redistricting be struck down in the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, and that its future actions be subjected to “opt-in” preclearance under Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act.
On the other hand, because Texas pushed the envelope on bad legislative acts, the State provided some cover for other states involved in similar lawsuits. It’s sometimes handy to be able to point to another entity and say, “Well, at least our state government didn’t try something on the order of what Texas did!”
In the case of the Wisconsin litigation, the plaintiffs lacked sufficient evidence of malicious racial intent to invoke key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In the case of the Alabama litigation, the plaintiffs prevailed only in knocking back a couple of fairly tenuous legal arguments justifying racial gerrymandering.
In the Texas litigation, the stakes are much higher, and the evidence for racial animus is much stronger. As for me, I just hope that the Supreme Court fixes the Texas mistakes. As much as I might hope that Justice Roberts would have a change of heart regarding the importance of the Voting Rights Act for the country as a whole, I really just want some acknowledgment that there are fact patterns so egregious that they can embarrass even a few hard-core states-rightists.
v
The Great Chain of Being Cranky About Disenfranchisement; or The Stupids, Continued
After the November election, a number of editorial articles came out with variations on the following theme – that the various depressing voter I.D. laws didn’t actually have much effect on elections. Because hey, the Republicans knocked the elections out of the park, right? That happened despite disproportionately good turnout among minority voters in some elections.
Such editorials are music to the ears of the extreme right (“Yeah. See, we’re not racists. If we were racists, we would have had to turn the firehoses on the swarms of minority voters that voted in the November 2014 federal elections. But we didn’t have to use firehoses or police dogs, or even fire any tear gas into the polling places. Therefore, we have conclusively demonstrated that we’re not racists. Plus, we love democracy. Democracy was very good to us.”) and to the defense attorneys representing the State of Texas in its appeal of Veasey v. Perry et al.
I mean, if an editorial by Nate Cohn in the New York Times, (that notorious hotbed of centrist legal opinions), comes out saying that voter I.D. weren’t no big deal, then the centerpiece of the plaintiffs’ evidence against the State in Veasey is undermined, and the State should walk on all charges, right?
Mr. Cohn was extending a dialog he had begun with the Brennan Center on this question with an earlier and similarly dumb editorial along the same themes.
Mr. Cohn’s argument runs like this: It must be the case that 600,000 Texas voters weren’t disenfranchised because if they had been disenfranchised, they would have been turned away from the polls. Since 600,000 people weren’t turned away from the polls, 600,000 people weren’t disenfranchised. Quod erat demonstram. Ipso facto. Res ipse loquitor. Et cetera.
And because only a fraction of all registered voters lack sufficient I.D., (say, 9 percent, or 11 percent, or something like that) it means that voter I.D. laws don’t actually change election outcomes. Right? Right? Because if the bad guy won by 20 percent, then even if all the voters without i.d. had been able to vote (and even if all of them had voted for the bad guy’s opponent), the bad guy would still have won by 11 percent, or 9 percent. Or whatever.
I’ve written about this before, but maybe if I write slower and louder, people will begin to understand.
The secret to getting people not to vote is to discourage them from attempting to vote. And because the cost of voting is so high compared to the benefit, it is very, very easy to discourage people from voting.
And when people don’t vote, they don’t make an ostentatious show of not voting. They don’t gather en masse, carrying placards and linked arm-in-arm at the polling place to not cast their ballot, in a vast silent repudiation of their civic authority. Such mass demonstrations by non-voters would be quite satisfying, if they happened, and would make for some fun political theater. But they don’t happen, because showing up at a polling place to not vote is almost as much bother as showing up at a polling place to vote.
Non-voters don’t go out of their way to proclaim their nonvoting status. They go to work or school. They run errands. They watch T.V. Some of them register to vote, but fail to register on Mr. Cohn’s radar, and so he assumes that they don’t exist. Some of them fail to register to vote, period, and so they don’t even show up in the statistics of “registered voters who lack i.d.”
The authors of the sociological studies at the heart of the plaintiffs’ case in Veasey v. Perry didn’t merely rely on the self-selecting sample of voters who actually go to vote. They called people up and asked them direct questions about their status as voters, and about their inclination to vote or not vote, based on their circumstances.
As it turns out, (as amply demonstrated by our most recent election) disenfranchisement works. It would have been embarrassing to the arch-conservative proponents and apologists for picture i.d. requirements if disenfranchisement hadn’t worked, because it’s actually kind of an administrative pain in the ass to exclude those naughty liberals from the polls, and it costs money to administer draconian voter i.d. laws. Luckily for the right, everything went swimmingly.
Let’s look at the November 2014 elections in one Texas county, and see how disenfranchisement succeeded in that county.
Harris County, Texas
Voters in Harris County had a long ballot to work on this year, in part because this very heavily populated county has an enormous county and district judiciary to handle the legal caseload generated by its roughly 4,330,000 residents. As it seems to happen every four years, the district and county courts were filled by Republican candidates, who pretty uniformly won their seats by consistent margins, just as they had even when Bill White carried Harris County in 2010.
2010 was a watershed year for the county – it was the first Federal decennial census in which Harris County had more than 4 million people. The City of Houston, meanwhile, was estimated to have just a smidge under 3 million people; there’s no doubt that Houston, like much of urban Texas, is experiencing a tremendous population boom. In fact, the county has added roughly 240,000 people or more since the 2010 Census; my guess (and the guess of the U.S. Census demographers) is that the recent population increase skews in favor of Hispanic or Latino residents.
As of the 2010 Census, slightly more than 40% of the Harris County population identified as Hispanic or Latino, while about 33% identified as non-Hispanic white, and about 18.4% identified as non-Hispanic black. As of 2013, those percentages were estimated to work out as 41% Hispanic, 19% Black, and 32% non-Hispanic white.
A lot of people under 18 live in Harris County, so let’s say that only about 72 percent of the total population are voting age. That’s about 3,117,600 voting age people in Harris County as of 2013.
So … how successful have people been at registering Harris County residents to vote? Well, out of those 3.12 million voting-age people in Harris County, only 2.06 million were registered to vote in the November 2014 election. So let’s see, um, that’s a 66% registration rate.
Hmm. Let’s see. In 2002 (a relatively slow gubernatorial election year, with anemic turnout), there were 1.9 million registered voters in Harris County.
But … Wait. What? That’s almost as many registered voters as there are now in that county.
What was the voting-age population of Harris County in 2002? Well, the estimated 2002 population in the county was 3.54 million. Of those, we’ll guess that around 71% were 18 or older (based on the 2000 census data). So that’s an estimated voting age population of 2.51 million in 2002, of whom 1.9 million were registered. That’s a 75.6% registration rate.
I’ll admit that a 75.6% voter registration rate wasn’t spectacular in 2002. But it was definitely better than a 66% registration rate in 2014. If the Harris County Voter Registrar had managed to just tread water with regard to registration between 2002 and 2014, we’d expect that there would be about 2.36 million registered voters in Harris County as of the November 2014 election.
Which works out rather nicely as a shortfall of 300,000 people in the Harris County voting-age population who should have been registered voters (based on historic trends), but who weren’t registered.
Now … from 2002 to 2014, the racial demographics in Harris County basically flipped for white and Hispanic voters. In 2002, about 42% of the voters were non-Hispanic whites, and about 32% of the voters were Hispanic.
What the Texas Republicans realized in 2011 is that they would have to find a way to discourage both voter registration and voting in Harris County, so that while the percentage of non-Hispanic registered voters would remain roughly steady (rising a very modest 8% over the course of 12 years), the percentage of Hispanic registered voters would need to go down. And it would need to go down by a big margin.
The available tools were varied, and ranged from bad-faith purges and registration challenges to outright bullying and strong-arm tactics. But none of those tools would be as effective (in terms of the percentage of potential votes suppressed) as a simple increase in the opportunity costs of voter registration and voting.
This is an area deserving of additional study, but I would hazard that by focusing solely on the suppressive effect of voter i.d. laws as applied to registered voters, studies by the Brennan Center and others have dramatically underestimated the intended and successfully achieved levels of vote suppression generally. The underestimate is the result of failing to consider the suppressive effect of harsh election laws not just on the people who are already registered to vote, but also on the people who haven’t registered yet.
If the suite of laws enacted in 2011 (not just picture i.d., but also restrictions on volunteer deputy registrars, the mealy scrutiny and comparison of error-ridden databases, etc.) managed to drop voter registration in Harris County by around 13%, and the picture i.d. requirement managed to mess up voter eligibility for around 9% to 11% of the remaining 2.06 million voters, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that (in Harris County, at least) that voter suppression succeeded in three ways, by:
(1) trimming the rolls of around 300,000 (mostly minority, poor, or elderly people) who would otherwise have registered to vote;
(2) discouraging another 180,000 to 220,000 registered voters from bothering to vote (the latter group also being disproportionately composed of minorities and the poor), and;
(3) so debasing and screwing up the election experience for everyone else that turnout was at an all-time low (around 678,000 votes cast in the big races, or around 33% of the registered voters).
It starts to look like the Republicans were running up the score in an unseemly way. I mean, if you start with 3.12 million possible voters (more or less), disenfranchise one sixth of those voters (say, around half a million), and then demoralize two thirds of the rest so badly that they don’t bother to come out and vote, well then … voila!
You get an instant Republican grand slam. A mandate for the ages, and an endorsement by our polity of the emerging πρωκτοκρατία (proctocratia, i.e., a form of government known as a proctocracy, administered by proctocrats).
Hey! You there! Candidates in Harris County who lost!
If you lost, and you lost by a margin of around 24% of the vote or less, strongly consider filing an election contest. Remember – such an action must be initiated not later than 30 days after the canvass of your election, by filing suit in district court. Your clock is ticking. Also remember (if you’re feeling a little sheepish about filing such a lawsuit) – that the November 2014 general election was an illegal election.
As for Mr.Cohn of the New York Times, here are some general tips for successfully navigating the confusing world we live in.
Sometimes bad actions are identified by absence, rather than presence. For example, if you are in a coal mine, and most of the canaries have suddenly gone silent, that isn’t proof that the remaining canaries are happy and content. That’s evidence that something is wrong.
“Well, everyone said that when the crew hit that natural gas pocket, it created a poisonous atmosphere. But I heard that at least 32% of the canaries were still singing. Therefore, the natural gas pocket could not have had any measurable effect on the health of the canaries. Q.E.D. Res ipse loquitor. Et cetera, et cetera. Say, does anyone else feel a little light-headed?”
Ginsburg Wasn’t So Wrong About Texas and Veteran’s I.D.s
As a number of news organizations have noted, Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Veasey v. Perry contained a minor factual error – originally, the dissent contained a sentence stating that Texas did not accept veteran’s I.D.s as acceptable forms of photo I.D. in the polling place.
In fact, this statement was true when S.B. 14 was signed into law in 2011 – veteran’s i.d.s were not acceptable forms of identification, specifically because they were not subject to regular renewal, and were not regarded as the equivalent of active military i.d.s.
Really, the statement that the law doesn’t permit the use of veteran’s I.D.s is still true, or at least would be true, but for a clever bit of sophistic maneuvering by the State.
Nothing in the language of the law has changed between 2011 and now, and so Justice Ginsburg’s mistake is entirely understandable. In fact, to have not spoken in error, she would have had to know about the unwritten internal politics surrounding the implementation of the voter I.D. law.
When Section 63.0101 of the Texas Election Code was amended to impose the requirement for photo I.D., subsection (2) of that section defined one form of acceptable I.D. as being “a United States military identification card that contains the person’s photograph that has not expired or that expired no earlier than 60 days before the date of presentation.”
Media sources and veterans groups castigated the law for what what veterans groups saw as a betrayal of their constituency. The outrage caught Governor Perry and the bill drafters by surprise, and came at an awkward time for Governor Perry (who was at that time campaigning for the Republican nomination in the 2012 Presidential election, and who was touting his support for a strong military).
The proponents and drafters of the Texas picture I.D. law had been so eager to disenfranchise minorities, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and students, etc., that they had rushed headlong into accidentally disenfranchising a large, politically active, and vocal voting bloc with symbolic importance for conservatives.
Oops.
The political reaction was swift. After delicate consultations (the rumblings of which are lightly hinted at within an October 17, 2013 memo issued by Keith Ingram, which among other things, urges county election officials to “discard” earlier materials regarding voter I.D.), the Secretary of State determined that the proper interpretation of the law was that veteran’s I.D.s were acceptable because they didn’t expire (glossing over the fact that technically, veteran’s I.D.s are not military I.D.s, and veterans are not members of the military). But things were briefly touch and go between groups touting veteran’s rights and the State of Texas.
Of course, what the episode illustrated in a more general way was the fundamental hypocrisy of the 2011 law – that the law was subject to ad hoc changes in its application and textual interpretation to benefit one group of voters over another, if those voters happened to be “the right kind of voters.”
What Happens Next
Rick Hasen was quoted in today’s Austin-American Statesman, giving his prognosis for the pending voter I.D. litigation in Corpus Christi. There aren’t any big revelations, although Prof. Hasen seems pretty pessimistic about how the 5th Circuit is likely to treat the case.
I’m terrible at future projections, because I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t think exactly the way I do – in my world, the 5th Circuit and Supreme Court would have to uphold the likely ruling by the trial court against the voter I.D. law, because any other outcome would be so intellectually bankrupt as to be embarrassing and damaging to the institutions of the court.
But, as people frequently remind me, the consequences of intellectual bankruptcy aren’t nearly so dire as to be a deterrent to bad decisionmaking, unfortunately.
The link in this case is http://electionlawblog.org/?p=65762
Texas Practices The Cut Indirect Toward All Those Asking for More Mobile I.D. Sites
The deadline to register to vote for the November election is Monday, October 6, 2014. Keep that date in mind as you consider the obstacles faced by voters who lack the required picture I.D. to vote.
In the parlance of Regency dandies, the gross insult of ignoring an acquaintance is a “cut,” with various gradations and forms, including the cut direct (the explicit snub), the cut indirect (the “accidental” snub), the cut sublime (“missing” the snubbed party by staring intently at the sky), the cut infernal (opportunistically staring at one’s own feet), and so on.
In response to requests from the League of Women Voters, Dallas County Elections, the Texas Democratic Party, Battleground Texas, and others, all asking that the State make some gesture towards resolving the lack of picture I.D. for hundreds of thousands of Texas voters, Texas officials have answered with a particularly insulting snub.
Now, keep in mind that attorneys for the State of Texas have touted the outreach efforts of the State in order to blunt the argument that the 2011 picture I.D. requirements are intended to disproportionately disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and minority voters, and that the creation of “mobile EICs’ (mobile election I.D. centers) by the Department of Public Safety is a centerpiece of the State’s effort to mitigate the negative consequences of the voter I.D. law.
So Texas officials must have really put their heart into getting i.d.s into the hands of voters who otherwise will be ineligible to vote, right? Let’s take a look at the schedule:
1. Mobile EIC for Dallas County – Tuesday, September 23, 2014 (i.e., two days from today, or 13 days before the deadline to register to vote).
| Dallas County Elections Department 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM | 2377 N. Stemmons Frwy., Suite 820, Dallas, Texas 75207 |
Hmm. One location. One day. A Tuesday. Six hours. In the middle of the day on a weekday. In a county with a voting-age population of 1.7 million, of whom an estimated 220,000 lack sufficient I.D. to vote.
Well, that’s one way to address the problem of lack of I.D. for voters in Dallas County. A few more slaps across the face with a silk glove, and all of Dallas County’s issues will simply melt away.
Presumably, the State would argue in response that (1) in 2013, more extensive efforts by both the State and Dallas County to address the lack of I.D. prior to the November 2013 constitutional amendment election (a sleepy off-year election) netted the production of only 6 I.D. cards, indicating (2) a lack of public concern or need for picture I.D.s.
Unfortunately, the State’s argument is undercut by selection bias and self-serving justification, and (as demonstrated below) by the disparate treatment of populations in other parts of the State. I don’t doubt that this lone mobile EIC won’t see much business, because really, how could it see much business?
Here’s a sure-fire recipe for failure:
(1) Take a group of voters who lack mobility, funds, adequate I.D., or any direct awareness of their ineligibility to vote (given that the targeted voters are less likely to see or know about “votetexas.gov,” or have any access to a computer or the Internet).
(2) Fail to address any of the obstacles these voters face in knowing about or getting adequate I.D.,
(3) Host a mobile I.D. clinic that is designed as a symbol and proof of failure and corrupted endeavor, and then announce that all those forgotten voters don’t actually exist, arguing that obviously if they did exist, they would have shown up promptly at the Dallas County Elections Office on Stemmons Freeway. at 10:00 a.m. on a weekday, with their original birth certificates or unexpired passports in hand and ready to apply for their election I.D.s.
But (you might think) maybe the State is so overwhelmed and so limited in resources that it can’t do a better job even if it wanted to. Hmm.
2. Mobile EIC for Tom Green County – Tuesday, September 23, Wednesday, September 24, and Thursday, September 25th, 2014.
September 23, 2014
| Location | Address |
|---|---|
| Goodwill 10:00 A.M-4:00 P.M. | 4216 College Hills Boulevard, San Angelo, Texas 76904 |
September 24, 2014
| Location | Address |
|---|---|
| Lowe’s Food Store 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM | 1926 North Bryant, San Angelo, Texas |
September 25, 2014
| Location | Address |
|---|---|
| Southside Recreation Center 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM | 2750 Ben Ficklin, San Angelo, Texas |
Hmm. The times of day aren’t any better – and each location is available only on one of three weekdays. But that’s three locations over three days, serving a voting-age population of 84,000, of whom an estimated 15,000 lack sufficient I.D.
So … Tom Green County has a little less than 5% of the voting-age population of Dallas County, but gets three times the amount of mobile I.D. stations.
Here’s another way to look at this. If you are a voter without the required photo I.D. in Tom Green County, the State of Texas loves and cares about you about 60 times more than it loves and cares about a voter without I.D. in Dallas County. Civil rights litigators take note – that looks to me like a prima facie violation of the Voting Rights Act.
3. Mobile EIC for Upshur County – Thursday, September 25
| Location | Address |
|---|---|
| Upshur County Tax Office 9:00 – 4:00 | P215 N Titus, Gilmer TX 75644 |
Okay, Upshur County gets an hour more than Dallas County, albeit also on a weekday during business hours. For a voting population of 29,500.
Upshur County’s voting population is 1.7% of Dallas County’s voting population. So, if you’re a voter in Upshur County, and you’re competing for the State’s affections with a voter in Tom Green County, how do you fare? You don’t get three days of help at three locations, admittedly, but there are fewer of you.
Well, my back-of-the envelope math suggests that the State only loves and cherishes you 58 times more than a similarly situated voter in Dallas County. Time to outbid Tom Green County on sending flowers to the Secretary of State.
But (you ask) what about Harris County? I mean, that’s one of the most populous counties in the nation, with a correspondingly large number of voters who lack picture I.D. How does Harris County fare?
4. Mobile EIC for Harris County – Saturday, September 27
| Location | Address |
|---|---|
| Moody Community Center Houston Multipurpose Room 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | 3725 Fulton Houston, Texas 77009 |
Saturday! For six hours! That’s a plus. But … that’s one location, one week prior to the deadline to register to vote. That’s for a countywide voting-age population of almost 2.95 million voters, of whom an estimated 529,000 lack sufficient I.D. to vote.
So, citizens of Harris County – the State is willing to give you six glorious hours of weekend access to a mobile EIC, offset somewhat by the fact that that sole mobile EIC is expected to serve a voting population that’s larger than the voting population of Dallas County by more than a third. So either the State cares slightly more for Dallas County voters, or slightly more for Harris County voters, depending on how one feels about not having to take time off on a weekday to get a picture I.D. Let’s call it a wash.
Now, I could keep on going – the State has scheduled mobile EICs to serve various towns and territories from now until October 15th, all holding generally to the pattern that the smaller, whiter, and more rural areas will get more opportunities than larger urban areas.
And my very rough summary doesn’t really capture the indignity of the schedule, because I’ve treated each mobile EIC as if it’s dedicated just to serving the voters in a single county. The disparate treatment of different populations is more pronounced when one engages in a more accurate analysis based on the total multi-county population served by each station. Because it’s not just that Dallas County only gets one mobile EIC between now and Election Day. It’s that the entire heavily urbanized and built up North Texas region gets one mobile EIC between now and Election Day – that spot at the Dallas County Offices will be the only mobile EIC offered to any voter without picture I.D. anywhere closer than halfway between the City of Dallas and the City of San Angelo. To put it in very rough geographic terms, one could say that the mobile EIC on Stemmons Freeway on Tuesday, September 23rd is serving all of the communities in Texas within about 100 miles of the City of Dallas. That includes all the cities and towns of the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area.
What is even more shocking than the poor service offered to Dallas County and Harris County residents is the complete snubbing (I guess we’d have to call it a “cut direct”) of Bexar County. There were a few locations in and around the San Antonio area that were manned leading up to the May elections, but the State currently plans to have no mobile EICs whatsoever for the greater San Antonio region between now and Election Day. Similarly, there will be no mobile EICs in the Austin area, but we already knew that the State hates Austin.
The handy thing about the schedule for mobile EICs that’s been posted by the State (http://votetexas.gov/election-identification-certificate-mobile-stations) is that by using it as a guide, you can get an excellent sense of just how much the State cares about you as a voter, and about how well-liked you are in the eyes of the State’s executive officers, based on how accommodating the State is of your needs between September 23 and November 4.
If you live in Amarillo, Waco, Tyler, Floresville, New Braunfels, Canyon Lake, San Angelo, or Gilmer, congratulations. The State likes you. If you live in or around Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, or San Antonio and you lack sufficient I.D., please note that the State is only as concerned for your welfare as is absolutely necessary to keep from breaking out in spontaneous snickering while defending against Section 2 Voting Rights Act claims in Federal court.
ALL HOPE IS NOT LOST
Between now and Election Day, voters in the unloved areas of Texas still have a chance to push for additional mobile EICs – at least based on this statement by the Secretary of State that, “[m]ore locations will be added as they are scheduled and confirmed. Based on the mobile nature of the units, locations, dates and times are subject to change.”
It is certainly possible that this picture will improve, but only if we compel the State to improve it. As Emily Post noted regarding the archaic and boorish practice of openly and deliberately ignoring someone’s presence:
Anyone who is preoccupied is apt to pass others without being aware of them, and without the least want of friendly regard. Others who have bad memories forget even those by whom they were much attracted. This does not excuse the bad memory, but it explains the seeming rudeness. A “cut” is very different. It is a direct stare of blank refusal, and is not only insulting to its victim but embarrassing to every witness. Happily it is practically unknown in polite society.” -Emily Post, “The Cut Direct” in Etiquette (1922) (emphasis added).
Texas Election Law Blog 