Tuesday’s Texas primary marked the first test of a sweeping statewide law that added new voting restrictions and threatened to prevent some voters’ absentee ballot count.
On Tuesday morning, there were no major reports of long lines or outside groups threatening or intimidating voters as a steady, albeit small, tide of voters cast their votes.
Early voting in the primaries was in line with previous midterm primaries. About 9 percent of registered voters voted early in the state’s 15 most populous counties, nearly equal to the number of early voters in the 2018 midterm primaries, according to data from the Texas Secretary of State’s office.
But both the rejection of absentee ballots and the return of ballots found to be defective increased sharply during the early voting period. Approximately 30 percent of ballots received were rejected in the state’s most populous counties almost exclusively because new rules required voters to put their driver’s license number or partial social security number on their ballot. In the 2020 election, the state’s overall rejection rate was below 1 percent.
The high number of absentee ballot rejections cast doubt on Texas Republican claims that the new voting law makes “voting easier and harder to cheat.” The law also includes new provisions that expand the autonomy of party poll monitors, increase criminal penalties for poll workers, and ban new voting methods pioneered in the 2020 elections, including pass-through voting and round-the-clock voting.
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The 2022 midterm elections will begin with the state’s primary on March 1.
These provisions are unlikely to face a real test in Tuesday’s primary. A low turnout in the primaries puts less strain on the electoral system.
Absentee voting in Texas represents a small portion of the electorate, as only those over the age of 65 or those with good cause can vote absentee by mail. The key question, which still remains unanswered, is how many rejected ballots will be corrected – or corrected, as election officials call it – and eventually counted.
But the new ballot correction process, which was passed as a separate law from the sweeping election revision, has also been hampered by confusion. Some voters were unsure about the exact timeframe for correcting their ballots and whether those ballots could be corrected by mail or in person.
Turnout in Texas primaries is often low and may not be an accurate indicator of turnout in November’s general election. However, what appeared to be a low turnout early in the day on Tuesday was a sign that the 2020 voting bonanza may not last until 2022.
More than 11.3 million Texas voters cast their ballots in the 2020 presidential election, up 10 percent from 2016, in a state that has often lagged behind the bottom of the country in voter turnout. The surge was at least partly driven by a surge in early voting as eligible voters opted for mail-in voting and others flocked to early in-person voting as a means to vote safely during the pandemic.
Democrats and civil rights groups have argued that the new law passed by Republicans in the Texas Legislature was designed in part in response to a surge in turnout and changing voter behavior during the pandemic, especially as more Democrats embrace mail-in voting. .
Early voting rates are difficult to compare with previous years. This year’s election marked the first time the Secretary of State released early voting data for all of Texas’ 254 midterm primaries. Previously, the state only tracked the 15 most populous counties.