Some county election officials across Texas say the number of people voting by mail has dropped since 2020, but they’re not sure why.
New research suggests that the recent overhaul of state election laws could explain some of the drop.
A study from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School looked at Texas voters whose mail ballots or applications to vote by mail were rejected in the 2022 primary, after the state enacted new identification requirements for mail ballots, among other changes. Many of those voters, the study found, appear to have switched to other voting methods or, in some cases, stopped voting.
The study found that 30,000 voters in that primary — or 1 out of 7 voters who started the process to vote by mail — had either their application or ballot rejected, and that “roughly 90% of these individuals did not find another way to participate in the 2022 primary.”
The authors said their findings show the potentially lasting effects of restrictive voting policies on even the most engaged voters.
About 85% of voters whose applications or ballots were rejected had voted in general elections in 2016, 2018, and 2020, said co-author Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.
“This is a group of people that are super highly engaged in the political process,” Morris told Votebeat. “They have a long history and habit of voting, so to see these effects among them is a big deal.”
The peer-reviewed study, co-authored with political scientists from Barnard College and Tennessee State University, is set to be published later this year in the Journal of Politics and was shared with Votebeat.
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In 2021, state lawmakers tightened the restrictions as part of an election law overhaul called Senate Bill 1. The legislation required voters to write their driver’s license or personal identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, on the mail ballot application or mail ballot envelope — whichever number they originally used to register. If the ID number was missing or didn’t match the number on file, the application or ballot could be rejected.
The March 2022 primary, the first statewide election after the legislation took effect, saw a dramatic increase in rejection rates: 12,000 absentee ballot applications and more than 24,000 mail ballots were rejected, amounting to a 12% rejection rate statewide, far higher than in previous years. In the 2020 presidential election, by comparison, the rejection rate was 1%.
Mail-voting applications and ballots of Asian, Latino, and Black Texans were rejected at much higher rates than those of white voters after the ID requirement was added, according to an earlier study by the Brennan Center.
For the more recent study, researchers obtained individual-level data on mail-voting ballot applications and mail ballots in the 2022 Texas primary from litigation documents and public-records requests to the Texas Secretary of State. They looked at the demographics and the voting history of the roughly 215,000 Texans who requested a mail ballot for that primary, and drilled down to the 30,000 voters who had either their application or ballot rejected.
More than 3,000 voters whose mail-voting applications were rejected voted in person instead in the 2022 primary.
Out of the more than 18,000 voters whose mail ballots were rejected, only 344 voted in person. The others did not ultimately vote in the primary.
The study said the rejections increased what it called the “cost of voting,” because voters had to “try to sort out why their mail ballot did not arrive, re-apply for an absentee ballot, and seek out details about where to vote in-person.”
“I can’t speak to any law other than SB 1,” Morris said, “but this does provide some evidence that the effect of being disenfranchised does make people even less likely to vote into the future.”
All of this sounds very familiar, and I’m glad someone did the work of pulling together the voter data and digging in to see what happened. This was always something that could be done, it just needed someone with the time and the resources to do it. The March 2022 primary was the low point, as most people were experiencing the new law for the first time and county election offices were seeing the effect. Since then, campaigns and parties and election offices have done a lot of outreach and education, and election offices have made design changes in the packages they send to voters to clarify what information is needed and where it goes, all of which have drastically reduced the rejection rate. But mail ballots being cast are still down, in part due to the poison Trump and Republicans have injected about them and in part because some people don’t like or trust using them any more. At every step of the way, over at least the past two decades, Republicans have worked to make it harder to vote. Voters and campaigns have adjusted again and again, but the cumulative effect keeps increasing. You know the drill – nothing will change until we change who we elect.