November 30, 2012
O. RICARDO PIMENTEL, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Texas’ restrictions on voter registration drives matter. And legal challenges to these are more than just academic exercises in social theory.
Before the November election, Texas imposed what were credibly considered the most restrictive rules on so-called third-party voter registration drives in the country.
As with the voter ID law, the state’s alleged rationale was that these were necessary to block voter fraud. But, of course, there is no widespread fraud to block.
This rationale is a straw man to distract from purely partisan motives: to dampen traditionally Democratic votes, especially voters of color.
Federal judges recognized those motives in blocking voter ID before the election. But a different court was not as discerning when it came to the registration drives. So those rules were in place for Texas in November.
Let’s look at what happened in Texas and in Bexar County, culled from census and election data.
Election officials generally calculate turnout as a percentage of registered voters who actually voted. But another way of looking at this is how many people voted as a percentage of the voting-age population.
Right. Ineligible noncitizens and felons are in this group. But as long as we use the same criteria year to year, we get a consistent sense of broader voter performance.
In the 2008 general election, 45.5 percent of the voting-age population voted in Texas, just shy of 54 percent in Bexar County.
This November, that was 43.5 percent in the state and 40.6 percent in Bexar County.
Yes, ’08 was historic, but 2012 was billed as no less consequential, if nothing else determining whether the nation’s first black — and allegedly socialist — president would be booted from office.
And the vote in San Antonio on a sales tax increase for early childhood education should have spurred interest.
And yet participation among the voting-age population went down.
Project Vote, which is suing the state over these restrictions, once contracted with the now scorned ACORN for drives between 1994 and 2008. But ACORN actually imploded over an embezzlement scandal. The rest was more isolated noise than broad substance.
Said Michael Slater, the Project Vote’s executive director, “We are no more ACORN than our phone vender is Project Vote.”
The real objection to third-party registration drives? Since 1994, Project Vote has enabled registration of more than 5.6 million Americans in low-income and minority communities, 35,000 in Texas in 2008 alone, mostly in Houston but 1,000 of these in Bexar.
But Project Vote skipped Texas altogether this time because of the restrictions. It thought these too burdensome.
The homegrown Southwest Voter Registration Education Project did register 17,337 in Texas, 9,244 of these in Bexar. But how many more would have been registered if not for the restrictions that effectively bar efforts from out of state groups?
Among these restrictions is a prohibition on employing out-of-staters in these drives and the need for these folks to get certified as volunteer deputy registrars in each county in which they want to collect registrations (effectively shutting down cross-county efforts). Criminal penalties are attached.
In Ohio, registration drives have brought rough parity in registration rates between whites and blacks. In Texas, the gap is wide — 73.6 percent for whites and 54.3 percent for Latinos.
Texas’ honchos, from available evidence, like it just fine this way.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, in a supporting brief in this case, notes that Texas “is the only state to make it a criminal offense to conduct a voter registration drive without prior deputization.”
Not a coincidence. READ MORE