Here’s another poll to demonstrate why.
A new survey from Rice University underscores the deepening partisan chasm over provisions in the controversial GOP priority elections bill.
For example, 46 percent of Harris County Republicans polled who participated in the county’s 2020 innovation of drive-thru voting said they supported the bill’s proposal to ban the method, despite 70 percent rating their experience as “excellent.”
The poll confirms other research that has found that confidence in the 2020 presidential election was closely linked with a voter’s political party. The poll also shows that preference for provisions in the GOP elections bill scheduled to be debated in the Texas House today follows the same pattern, said Bob Stein, Rice University political science professor and a co-author of the poll.
“It’s the persistence of partisan polarization,” Stein said, adding that he was surprised that so many Republican drive-thru voters who said they would be interested in drive-thru voting again also said they would support outlawing it.
[…]
The majority of Harris County voters who used drive-thru and 24-hour voting, 53 percent and 56 percent respectively, are Black, Hispanic or of Asian descent, county data shows. Democrats say banning the methods will discourage minority participation in future elections.
Republicans, meanwhile, say the methods were never supposed to be allowed under Texas law and point to their lack of popularity.
For example, while drive-thru voting was the highest-rated method of voting, according to the poll, it was also not an option used by many in the county. About eight percent of Harris County voters, or more than 127,000, voted from their cars.
Still, political leanings influenced opinions, even among those who hadn’t used drive-thru voting themselves: 95 percent of Democratic voters opposed a ban on drive-thru voting while 71 percent of Republican voters approved.
Democrats and Republicans were also far apart on the issue of 24-hour driving, another target of the GOP elections bill. Ninety-two percent of Democrats did not want to see it banned, but 75 percent of Republicans did.
Polling data can be found here. This discussion has long since a meta-argument about rote talking points, but it’s still worth noting how ridiculous some of this is. It’s true that the 127K people who used drive through voting last year were a small fraction of the total number of voters, but that was the first time we ever tried that, and by any measure 127K people is a lot. It’s more than the number of people who voted by mail in 2016 or 2018, and we’ve had vote by mail for decades. I would bet decent money that if we continued to offer drive through voting, more and more people would take advantage of it, just as more and more people are now taking advantage of early voting. Back in 2002, fewer than one out of four voters voted early in person. In 2020, more than three out of four voters did so.
But like I said, none of this matters. It doesn’t matter that there isn’t even a suggestion of why drive through voting or 24-hour voting might be even slightly more susceptible to the microscopic amount of “voter fraud” that we currently experience, nor does it matter that all of these ideas, in addition to being useful and convenient and well-executed, were put in place as a way of making it easier and safer to vote in the midst of a global pandemic. None of these things were thought of by the previous Republican county clerks, and they hurt Donald Trump’s feelings, so they are Bad and they Must Be Stopped. That’s all you need to know. KHOU has more.
