O. RICARDO PIMENTEL, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
When Noe Alaniz and the volunteers he recruits have gone door-to-door to register voters in Latino neighborhoods in Bexar County, many of the people who answer the door are first-generation Americans.
Observed: Immigrant parents can bring with them distrust of the electoral process, borne of contact with the elections and governments in their countries of origin. Sometimes, these parents infect their offspring.
That’s one obstacle. Then there’s the apathy that generally permeates Texans. Add on top of that the difficulties generally in getting lower-income populations to register, and it amounts to a tough road getting minorities, including Latinos, to the polls
That Texas, through its voter ID law, has tried to make it tougher still is, by now, a well-vetted proposition. Less well vetted is how the state also has thrown down obstacles before voter-registration drives.
How restrictive Texas can be on these voter registration drives is the subject of a federal court case in Galveston. Voting for America, an affiliate of the national Project Vote, helps with registration drives and has sued Texas over 2011 legislation, among the toughest in the nation.
Among other things, this bill tells these drives who they can hire (no out-of-staters), where these workers can work (only in one county at a time if they are not “deputized” in others), how workers can be paid (not per registration) and what they can do with the applications (don’t photocopy them, and don’t mail them in).
These steps make voter registration drives more difficult to accomplish. U.S. District Court Judge Gregg Costa issued a preliminary injunction recently, barring the state from enforcing these, though he allowed other provisions dealing with training, completeness of the registration applications and ID requirements for the drive workers to continue.
On Tuesday, he denied a stay of that injunction, amending it only slightly.
Voting for America argued its case on constitutional grounds, correctly equating freedom of speech and association with registration efforts, also arguing that federal law preempts the state.
Alaniz is a field organizer for the nonpartisan Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project. He said he hones his message in these Latino neighborhoods: “You don’t like the streets? Fixing them depends on who’s involved.” And who votes.
Lately, the organization has registered 5,000 new voters in Bexar County, part of 12,577 new voters it has registered in Texas generally.
Vice President Lydia Camarillo said although her group has not been as affected as others have by this law, its intent is clear. “It really is an attempt to stop people from voting,” she said.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the state says a lot of its effort here is spurred by concerns about voter fraud. But in this case, the Attorney General’s Office has come the closest I’ve seen to admitting its failure to prove it happens.
“Although it almost certainly exists,” the AG says in court filings, “the legitimacy of that concern is not undermined by the failure to show specific instances of fraud.”
Voting for America, by the way, doesn’t want to pay workers per registration. But it says, and the judge agreed, that the law is worded is such a way that the organization can’t use how many folks get registered as a standard to judge workers. No way, the judge said.
Here’s what else the judge said, “Voter registration drives have played a vital role in increasing participation in the political process.”
The judge didn’t say it, but I will: Perhaps some folks in the Legislature fear these drives work too well. READ MORE