Back when he was our attorney general, Greg Abbott searched high and low for evidence of voter fraud.
This would have been about a decade ago, when the Texas Legislature needed to gin up support for voter ID, their newly-minted voter suppression technique.
At the time, Abbot was only able to come up with a handful of prosecutable voter fraud cases, and those examples were scattered throughout five or six statewide elections. Out of the millions upon millions of votes cast in the half-dozen or so elections Abbott canvassed, there wasn’t enough in-person voting irregularities to warrant much of anything, including the effort he devoted to the endeavor.
The take-away from that effort was — at least for me — the Texas GOP had this solution that they really liked (because it appealed to the anti-immigrant fervor infecting the GOP) and were in search of a problem for it to solve.
The lack of a problem did not deter them from enacting one of the most draconian voter ID laws in the land.
Fast forward about a decade and you can see that Texas Republicans are still looking for a problem for their restrictive election policies to solve, despite there being no evidence of an actual problem.
According to the Houston Chronicle, our current AG, Ken Paxton, released his team to uncover all of the irregularities he was certain would be found in the 2020 election. What with all the mail in votes, the massive early voting turnout, the drive-thru voting … all that, surely prosecutable mistakes were made.
After devoting 22,000 man-hours to the search, they came up with 12. Not 12 fraudulent votes, 12 “irregularities” like inconsistent addresses or similar typographical issues.
In other words, it was a clean, fair and secure election.
“This is not a crisis that impacts the outcome of our elections, like they are being portrayed,” Rep. John Bucy told me when we sat down to talk about this issue last week. Bucy, who is our State Representative, sits on the Elections Committee in the Texas House and has filed about 20 bills that would make it easier to cast a ballot in Texas. “This is a political game. It has nothing to do with election integrity.”
But, as in the past, the lack of actual voter fraud isn’t stopping Texas Republicans — who’ve held every lever of state government for 20 years — from imposing its will on the electorate.
There are two bills making their way through the Texas Legislature, one in the House and a companion in the Senate. If passed into law (and, is there any question that Republicans will pass them?), they would (among other things) make it harder to help someone register to vote, limit early voting, forbid drive-through voting after hours voting, make it harder to drive your elderly mother to the polls and, in a weird turn that will likely put Texas Republicans on every doctor’s “do not resuscitate” list, require an actual doctor’s excuse if you want to vote by mail because you have a disability.
As is true of every single election integrity policy they favor, these measures will have a profound impact on people of color, rural Texans, working poor, students and the elderly.
As a Washington Post editorial put it last week, Texas Republicans are almost surgical in their cynicism when it comes to “protecting” the vote.
Bucy had words about that cynicism.
“If this state is as conservative as they say, why don’t they want everyone to vote and just prove it?” he demanded. “We had an election that the Secretary of State said was a success, smooth and secure. We had the best turnout in 29 years. What problem are we fixing? And, let it be known, they still control all levels of government. So, even though we had more people participate, it’s not like the Democrats took over. We had more participation … and it led to them still holding their power so I’m not sure what problem they’re correcting.”
I have an answer, Rep. Bucy. Great swaths of Texas are tinging purple, if not blue (a glance at the voting trends of south Williamson County will demonstrate this) and that they barely escaped the 2020 election with their hides intact.
So, to them, election integrity means that their voters are favored over other voters.
Oh, right. I get it. The solution in search of a problem? We found the problem and it’s that too many of the other voters are voting.
Richard Stone hosts an independent politics and current events podcast called The Ragged Edge. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google and other popular podcast servers. You can hear the entire conversation with Rep. John Bucy on the most recent upload or at raggededge.buzzsprout.com.
This column was also published in The Hill Country News.
The Ragged Edge 