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September 28th, 2018:

Interview with Alex Karjeker

Sep 28th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Alex Karjeker

We conclude our tour of Harris County legislative districts with a trip to the southern end of the county into HD129. Alex Karjeker grew up in Clear Lake and attended public schools there before heading to UT for degrees in math and economics. After a stint working in Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s office, he got a masters from Georgetown and has worked since then for Morgan Stanley and Uber. HD129 is another one of those districts that have remained stubbornly Republican, but it is also suburban and has a lot of college graduates, so who knows. Karjeker has been one of the more successful fundraisers among the Democratic legislative candidates in the county, so whatever the past electoral history of this district, keep an eye on HD129. Here’s what we talked about:

You can see all of my interviews for state offices so far as well as other information about the candidates on my 2018 Legislative Election page.

Lots more voters registered statewide

Sep 28th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Always good to hear.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The Texas voter rolls have grown to 15.6 million people, a new record, Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos confirmed.

That is nearly a 400,000-person increase since March and a jump of 1.6 million since the last time Texas held a midterm election in 2014, according to election records.

And there is still time for more voters to join the rolls before Oct. 9, the final day to register in time to vote in the midterm elections.

[…]

Registering to vote and casting a ballot are two different things in Texas. Despite having 14 million registered voters in 2014, just 4.7 million people voted — about 34 percent of voters. In presidential cycles, voter turnout is much higher, hitting almost 60 percent in 2016 and 2012.

Here’s a convenient table that was included in the story to illustrate the progression of the voter rolls:

Voter Registration in Texas For Midterm elections over last 20 years


2018 - 15.6 million

2014 - 14.0 million

2010 - 13.2 million

2006 - 13.1 million

2002 - 12.6 million

1998 - 11.5 million

So there’s been more people registered to vote in the last four years than there were in the twelve years before that combined. There has been a comprehensive effort among various groups to increase Texas’ voter numbers – registering voters was in fact one of the few things that Battleground Texas did well in the 2014 cycle – so it’s good to see that pay off. Harris County by itself can account for nearly 250K of those new registrations since 2014. There’s definitely been a big focus on registering people in this cycle, which should not come as a surprise to anyone who has not been in a cryogenic state.

As noted, registering and voting are two different things. That said, even if the turnout rate remained at 34 percent as it was in 2014, that would translate to 5.3 million ballots cast, modulo however many more people get signed up before the 9th. For what it’s worth, I investigated the question of new voters voting in Harris County in 2014. As I recall (I can’t find the post I wrote about it right now), something like 21% of the brand-new voters turned out in 2014. That’s not great, but it’s not nothing, either. Twenty-one percent turnout of those 1.6 million new voters statewide would still push the 2014 total to just over five million. In 2016, turnout as a percentage of registered voters in Harris County was down compared to 2008 and 2012, but the total number of actual voters was up 130K over 2012, precisely because there were so many (300K in all) more voters. One way or another, expect 2018 turnout to exceed 2014. The real question is who those voters will be.

ACLU reminds counties to provide voting materials in Spanish

Sep 28th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

From the inbox:

With weeks to go before the November 6 election, the ACLU of Texas has sent advisal letters to 36 counties across Texas that may be in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The letters urge the identified counties to comply with a provision in the law that requires any information about voting or elections to be provided in English and Spanish in counties where more than 10,000 or more than 5% of all voting age citizens are Spanish-speakers with low English proficiency.

“Counties need to ensure that they are providing all citizens with information that will enable them to vote,” said Edgar Saldivar, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas. “The obligation to provide information in Spanish is a simple but important requirement which helps to remove barriers to voting in the state with the largest number of counties needing foreign language voting materials.”

ACLU of Texas attorneys reviewed county election websites and looked at whether pertinent information was made available in Spanish, including voter identification information, key voting dates, voter registration information, and applications for ballot by mail and absentee voting. The preliminary research determined that 36 counties had inadequate or inaccessible information in Spanish, had poor or misleading translations, or offered no voting information in Spanish at all. For example, one county’s use of an automated translation service translated the term “runoff election” as “election water leak” or “election drainage.”

Several counties have already responded positively to the letters, agreeing to comply with the Voting Rights Act and include Spanish language voting information on their websites.

Click over to see the list of counties. If one of them is yours, maybe make a call yourself to your local elections administrator. It’s a little hard to believe that any county could still have problems with this after all this time, but here we are.