Partisan Republican efforts to make it more difficult to vote—at least for people in Democratic-leaning urban areas—continue to be backed up by partisan Republican judges. Monday night, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s vote-suppressing order allowing just one ballot drop-off location per county.
That order, which according to the three Trump-appointed judges on the panel does not put an added burden on some voters during the pandemic, means that, for instance, Harris County, with a population of 4.7 million and an area greater than the state of Rhode Island, has the same number of drop-off locations as the state’s smallest rural county. Harris County, which not coincidentally is home to 25% of the state’s Black residents and 18% of the Latino ones, had to close 11 of its 12 drop-off spots.
Can we win Texas? Absolutely. Get on the phones on Thursday with Turnout2020, and help Democratic voters in the Lone Star State request absentee ballots to flip the state blue. When you sign up, please remember to mark "Daily Kos" as the volunteer team that recruited you.
But, the Trump judges said, Abbott’s Oct. 1 order for counties to close drop-off locations on Oct. 2 was not a restriction of the ability to vote because it was a downgrading of an earlier expansion, in which Abbott suspended a state law allowing mail ballots to be hand-delivered only on Election Day.
So: On July 27, Abbott said mail ballots could be hand-delivered. Counties set up locations for that. On Oct. 1, after months of Donald Trump attacking vote-by-mail, Abbott said whoa whoa whoa, nope, only one location per county, no matter how many people that county has and no many square miles it is. According to the 5th Circuit panel: “How this expansion of voting opportunities burdens anyone’s right to vote is a mystery. Indeed, one strains to see how it burdens voting at all.”
Hmm. Well, for starters, Texas only allows no-excuse voting by mail for people who are over 65 or have a disability—exactly the people who are most at risk in the coronavirus pandemic. So the population of people voting by mail is disproportionately vulnerable, and as we know, Black and Latino people are also disproportionately vulnerable, but Abbott’s order puts ballot drop-off most out of reach for people in the parts of the state with the highest Black and Latino populations. It will take some Texans more than an hour to drop off ballots.
That’s why, in the order overturned by the 5th Circuit, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote: “Older and disabled voters living in Texas’ largest and most populous counties must travel further distances to more crowded ballot return centers where they would be at an increased risk of being infected by the coronavirus in order to exercise their right to vote and have it counted.”
Early voting started in Texas Tuesday morning with long lines at some voting locations.
