Texas GOP’s proposed election reforms would restrict mail-in voting for seniors, early voting

Leaders of Texas’ Republican Party continue to promote false claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump – and during the Texas GOP convention in Houston last month, members overwhelmingly voted to make election reforms the party’s No. 1 priority.

As the Houston Chronicle reports, this means they want the state to adopt laws in the 2023 legislative session that would further restrict voting by shortening the early voting period from two weeks to one and by no longer letting any senior vote by mail.

“They’re going off of this assumption that there’s more fraud in early voting and in mail voting,” said Jeremy Wallace, a political reporter at the Chronicle’s Austin bureau. “That is based on some of the unproven claims from former President Donald Trump about how elections went in other states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, and the Texas Republican Party has kind of grabbed that baton and are pushing it in Texas, even though there’s been no evidence that the expanded early voting time that we have here in Texas has resulted in additional fraud.”

Under legislation that would limit seniors from voting by mail, instead of letting anyone over the age of 65 have the option, as they have for decades, seniors would instead only be able to do so with an excuse.

Out of the million voters who utilized mail-in voting for the 2020 presidential election, 850,000 were 65 and up, Wallace said. But Republicans’ new proposal would limit absentee voting to those who are in the military, have a disability or are out of the country.

My county uses Hart voting machines. Texas does not use Dominion machines. We use Hart and ExpressVote. I know for a fact that after the 2010 elections, Republican officials in my county were relieved when the state of Texas funded replacement of paper ballot systems in the southern part of our congressional district.

I worked the recount in my county for the 2010 congressional election. The Republican challenger had a 799 vote lead when counting ended on election night. The 14 term DemocRAT incumbent ask for a recount. Guess what!? He only wanted to recount DemocRAT stronghold precincts where there had been a "power outage" and emergency paper ballots had to be used. Well the county said, "No way Jose!" Under Texas law, you have to recount the whole county. That cost his campaign over $30K.

We recounted all the electronic votes loading each precinct in numerical order. Every precinct had identical results precinct by precinct. Then the next morning, we sorted all the absentee ballots by precinct. After all the ballots were sorted by precinct, we started counting the ballots with one precinct per table. When a precinct was finished, a new precinct's ballots would be taken to the counting table under armed escort by a county constable to a the table. We counted all the absentee ballots for the congressional race, then all the emergency ballots for the "Democrat strongholds" with "power outages." The results were IDENTICAL precinct by precinct for the whole county including the emergency ballots. In the southern counties of the congressional district where only paper ballots were used, several hundred votes "switched" to the DemocRAT candidate. Fortunately not enough votes "switched" to affect the outcome on election night. I have very little confidence in the integrity of elections that use paper ballots.

Mechanical voting machines, perhaps. Electronic machines aare easy enough to manipulate that one would wonder why any are not manipulated. The Dominion machines have an inserted at the factory algorithm that switches a set percentage of votes. It turns out also that virtually all of them in 2020 were attached to the internet though we were all assured that they were not.

Texas is switching to a system where each ballot will be recorded on paper too. In the mean time, every ballot is now recorded as a PDF, so it is possible to account for each ballot. The votes are not just recorded as totals for each race. No voting machines in Texas are connected to the internet or to a WiFi router. There are numerical sealed tags on the doors that close off the ports on the voting server/controller machines. The tags have to match up with what was recorded by the county clerk's office and by the election judge at poll opening and poll closing. You can't just plug in a USB device on the voting machines or the servers. Also the machines are not left unattended while precincts are open. Furthermore in Texas both parties are allowed to have a judge at each precinct. Also each party and each entity on the ballot is allowed to have poll watchers. I have worked every job on election day. I have been an election clerk, poll watcher, election judge, alternate judge, and recall worker. I know what I'm talking about.

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