THE MAIL BOX – It hasn’t come yet and may never. Oh, it was promised. “A better way to protect our most sacred right,” they told me. “This will prevent fraud and corruption.” I’m referring to my ballot application.
As we all know, Texas is leading the other 49 states in protecting us from stuffing the ballot boxes, dead men voting and, of course, voting for Democrats. Even before the transparent voting prevention laws were passed in the last session of the Texas Legislature, a study compiled by political scientists determined it was harder to vote in Texas than in any other state.
On Election Day in 2020 there were 29.8 million Texans. Of these, 21.6 million were of voting age, and almost 17 million were registered voters, or 78 percent. But millions of these eligible voters stayed home, or couldn’t find their county’s single ballot box. Only a little more than half (52.39 percent) of those who were of voting age actually cast a ballot.
Texas’ voter turnout has always been dismal. In 2016, for example, Florida, which has 4 million fewer voting-age people than Texas, 1 million more Floridians voted than Texans.
Now, in light of these new laws passed, and gleefully signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, voting in Texas is harder than ever. No more 24-hour voting, no drive-by ballot casting and voting by mail is as hard as the lawmakers could make it this side of guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar. That actually happened. My wife and I had been voting by mail for years, and that was easy. (In the first election when I could vote, my candidate lost CCXXI to CCVII).
Like many other Texans, this year I looked around for an application to vote in the party primaries. I heard about vote.org. It sounded like a county, state or even national government operation to get-out-the-vote. So I went online, applied for a ballot application and was sent a form asking for the usual info, plus my phone number, sex and race. That seemed odd. Anyway, I mailed this form to the Harris County Elections administration. Long story short, vote.org is a company out of Oakland, California. which then proceeded to ask for a donation.
As former Texas lieutenant governor Bill Hobby (oh, for the days when he held that office) would have said, this vote.org didn’t pass the smell test. So my wife, bless her, called the Texas League of Women Voters, one of my favorite organizations even if I can’t join, and she got a real-live person on the phone. The nice lady said she would email us application forms, which arrived shortly.
Have you seen this application for a mail-in ballot? OK, the first part is the usual name, rank and serial number. Then it asks for my VUID. Quick now, what’s your VUID? Indeed, what is a VUID? I had to shuffle through my desk past the 2001 Playboy calendar, angry letters from the bank – something about being overdrawn and underfunded – and a forgotten ham sandwich, to find my Voter Registration Certificate.
In small print it listed my 10-digit secret password. What voting precinct do you reside in? I had no idea, but I had to get out my Voter Registration Certificate again (and toss the ham sandwich) to find it. Then I needed to give my driver’s license number or the last four digits of my Social Security ID. Next question: “Annual Application.” Do we have to do this every year? It seems once I registered I stayed registered. Incidentally, our secretary of state oversees Texas’ elections. That’s John Scott, who briefly represented Donald Trump in a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania.
All these new hoops a wannabe voter has to jump through causes me wonder: Is the Texas state government trying to make it as difficult as possible to vote? No, not the Legislature, Gov. Abbott and Lite Guv. Dan Patrick. Next Box: “Why Are You Applying to Vote by Mail?” There are five choices: Over 65, Have a Disability, Expected to give birth within three weeks, Incarcerated or Outside the County. There should be space for comments and/or explanations: “I’m 165. My disability is that I’m a wounded veteran from the Texas Revolution. I expect to give birth because you closed my Planned Parenthood branch. I’m incarcerated for 40 years because I mistakenly voted in the 25th hour of a 24-hour ballot drop-off. I’m outside the county because I visited Matamoros and can’t get through the Texas National Guard minefields.” Perhaps I could comment: “I would like to vote by mail because I don’t want to stand in line in the rain between people coughing and sneezing who wear a MAGA cap or a buffalo headdress with horns.”
If all of this gobbledygook sounds confusing, it is – to thousands of Texans and even voting officials. Whoever drafted these rules must be the same people who ran our evacuation from Kabul. At last report, Harris County had received 4,061 mail-in ballot applications, and each day between 15 to 35 percent of them are being rejected — a rate many times higher than in previous years. Travis County officials rejected roughly half of the about 700 applications. A main reason for voter applications being rejected is because an applicant’s driver’s license or SSN doesn’t match the state’s number. Maybe they could check the number you wear on your orange overalls — the one issued by the Texas Department of Corrections.
Here’s my problem: I sent the county election office that questionable form from vote.org. Then, upon receiving a real application courtesy of the Texas League of Women Voters, I sent it in, too. That makes two applications. Voter fraud! Our trial-avoiding attorney general, Ken Paxton, who has already spent millions of our taxpayer dollars seeking non-existent fraudulent voters, will probably put my wanted picture on post office bulletin boards. Maybe Paxton and I will be cell mates.
Ashby votes at ashby2@comcast.net