Texas Registrar Stifles Voter Registration Efforts

Harris County, Texas has become latest battleground in the ongoing struggle over voter registration, and it appears the unregistered voters of Texas are the ones that will suffer most. County registrar and Tea Partier Leo Vasquez has accused local voter registration organization Houston Votes of committing “organized and systematic attack” on the “integrity of the voter roll.”

Some of the tens of thousands of voter applications submitted by Houston Votes have been found to be incomplete or incorrectly filled out. In turn, Vasquez and his fellow Harris County Tea Partiers think that these incomplete applications are an intentional attack on the voter registration process.

But, according to Houston Votes founder Fred Lewis, it is Vasquez who has damaged the integrity of the voter registration process. Lewis fears that Vasquez’s inflammatory rhetoric will discourage new voters from registering, and scare already registered voters into staying home on Election Day, ultimately resulting in the suppression of Harris County voters.

Last month, Vasquez handed over tens of thousands of voter registration applications to the local Tea Party, known as the King Street Patriots. The Tea Party has reportedly been given free reign to inspect those applications and to decide their legitimacy. These “Patriots” make no secret about their distaste for voter registration drives: on their website, truethevote.org, the King Street Patriots have posted a video that accuses voter registration organizations like Houston Votes of being part of a “radical army” that threatens to corrupt the electoral process.

According to an estimate from Houston Votes, Harris County has more than 600,000 eligible voters that are unregistered. Vasquez’s statements and the Tea Party’s scare tactics, Houston Votes cautions, may have a devastating impact on Election Day. Houston Votes’ original goal of helping register more than 100,000 new voters appears increasingly difficult as the controversy grows and potential voters begin to feel like criminals simply for registering to vote.

Anthony Balady is a legal intern at Project Vote.