Sure, let’s blame the supply chain for voter registration problems

I have a simple solution for this, if anyone wants to hear it.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The Texas Secretary of State’s office is having more trouble than usual getting enough voter registration cards to groups who help Texans register to vote.

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, said supply chain issues have made it harder and more expensive to get paper, which means the Secretary of State’s office will be giving out fewer voter registration forms to groups ahead of elections this year.

“We are limited in what we can supply this year, because of the paper shortage and the cost constraints due to the price of paper and the supply of paper,” he said.

Grace Chimene, the president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, said it is not unusual for the Secretary of State to not have enough forms to fill all the requests it gets from groups like hers ahead of elections. This particular shortage, however, is affecting an important part of her group’s work: registering thousands of newly naturalized citizens.

Chimene said in previous years, her group, which has chapters across the state, has been able to get enough forms to pass out at naturalization ceremonies. Often, she said, the group partners with the state to give out several thousand forms at each ceremony.

“The League in Houston registers about 30,000 new citizens every year through these ceremonies in the past,” Chimene said.

[…]

Taylor said the Secretary of State’s office has been forced to limit each group to 1,000 to 2,000 registration forms per request. He said this shortage is coming at a time when many groups are seeking out new voter registration forms because of a change in Texas’ voter registration laws created under Senate Bill 1, a controversial voting law that went into effect last month.

“The voter registration application changed this year for one reason: It’s because the legislature decided to increase the penalty for illegal voter registration from a class B misdemeanor to a class A misdemeanor,” he said.

Previously, Taylor said that change had to be reflected on registration applications in order for them to be approved. But, after this story was published Tuesday, he clarified that’s not necessarily the case.

“While we have made clear to officials and groups that they should not be distributing the old version of the Voter Registration form, county voter registrars may accept completed voter registration applications on the old form, so long as the application is otherwise valid,” Taylor said in a statement Tuesday. “In other words, using last year’s form in and of itself is not fatal to the voter’s registration application.”

Chimene said all these constraints present serious issues for her group as they try to get voter registration materials together ahead of these large naturalization ceremonies.

“We are treating all organizations that request these the same,” Taylor said. “We are trying to fulfill these requests as fast we can. But the fact is we simply don’t have the supply to honor every single request for free applications.”

According to Chimene, this is one of the pitfalls of Texas being among the few states in the country that does not have online voter registration. Supply chain issues are not as big of a problem when you can just direct someone to a website.

I mean, give me a break. First, as noted before, there is no reason to trust John Scott. Do not take him at his word. News folks, you need to push him a lot harder on this.

Second, I know we’re only allowed to do online voter registration in certain limited circumstances, and we’re not going to get a special session to get the Lege to authorize further uses of it. You can, however, fill out the form on the SOS website, which you then have to print and sign and mail in, because that’s how we roll here. What it appears that you can’t do is just download and print the form itself, on your own paper, for use at things like voter registration drives. The LWV could bring iPads or laptops to those naturalization events and have the new citizens do the form-filling online, but then each one would have to be printed as they go. Not very conducive to such efforts. We are absolutely committed to doing this in the least convenient and most stupid way possible.

Oh, and we also have the absentee ballot rejection issue, and a lack of training materials, and other issues. Not all of this is the SOS’s fault, but it is their job. And either they failed to communicate to the Republicans in the Lege and Greg Abbott just how much they were about to screw things up, or (more likely) failed to get them to listen and care. And here we are.

So sure, blame the supply chain. Anything to distract from the real problem.

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• I think you know the root cause of the problem, John