Texas Shows The Big Impact Of Trump’s Big Lie
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | March 31, 2022
Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him was used last year as phony justification for GOP-controlled state legislatures around the country to enact destructive voter suppression laws. These laws are aimed at Black, brown, and other minority voters, urban residents, the elderly, and the disabled.
The goal of these laws is clear: Provide major partisan advantage for Republican candidates by making it much harder for Democratic supporters to vote.
Texas, which enacted one of the worst of these laws last year, has given us a sneak preview into the deluge of voter suppression that will occur in 2022.
In the light-turnout Texas primary on March 1, about 13 percent of the mailed ballots cast were rejected, according to Associated Press. This compares with a rejection rate in past years of between one and two percent.
More than 18,000 voters, or 15 percent, had their mail-in ballots rejected in the state’s most populous counties, according to a New York Times analysis. To put this in perspective, nearly one million absentee ballots were cast in all of Texas in the 2020 election and just 9,000 – approximately one percent – were rejected.
The Times analysis found that the ballot rejections had the largest impact in Black communities – with Black residents making up the largest racial group in six of the nine zip codes that had the most rejections in Harris county, the state’s most populous county.
According to a Harris County Elections spokesperson, “The new voting laws brought on by Senate Bill 1 are leading to the disenfranchisement of Harris County’s most vulnerable populations, including communities of color, the elderly, and voters with disabilities.”
According to El Paso Matters, the new law “disenfranchised 15% of El Paso’s absentee voters, who are some of El Paso’s longest-tenured and most active voters.” Their analysis found that 70 percent of El Paso’s rejected ballots were from voters who registered more than 25 years ago; 17 percent registered 50 or more years ago.
Even Texas legend Willie Nelson and his wife Annie D’Angelo-Nelson had their mailed ballots rejected. According to D’Angelo-Nelson, “We’ve voted by mail before. All of a sudden, this time it was ridiculously difficult.”
D’Angelo-Nelson said, “If they’re doing it to Willie Nelson, what happens to an 89-year-old woman at home without a lot of help? I’m 65, and I’m fairly technologically capable, and I can find ways. But what happens to all those people? It’s just not fair.”
The Texas law accomplished precisely what it was meant to do and its damaging impact on voting warns of a major threat ahead to the right of all eligible Americans to vote.
The new Texas voting law and the other voter suppression laws enacted around the country would have been overridden in federal elections by the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act if an effort to modify the Senate filibuster rules had succeeded.
That effort was blocked in January by 50 Senate Republicans and two Senate Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Joe Manchin (WV).
These Senators apparently couldn’t care less if potentially millions of Americans – Black, brown, Native, disabled, elderly, and urban voters – lose their right to vote.
The 2020 national election had a record turnout and was “the most secure in American history,” according to top security officials in the Trump Administration.
Now, because of voter suppression laws and the decision of 52 Senators, the 2022 congressional elections are headed for voter chaos. These anti-democracy Republican state officeholders and the Senators who blocked reform have chosen voter suppression over voter participation.
Our democracy will pay a heavy price for their decision.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. Or, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
