Texans who tried to vote by mail in the March primary had their ballots rejected because they collided with the Texas Republican Party’s 2021 restrictive vote, known as Senate Bill 1 (SB 1).  Spurred on by false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Texas enacted the election law in 2021 with many egregious provisions that impose a wide range of voter suppression measures, such as mail-to-mail voting obstacles, new voter ID requirements, and limitations on what election officials can do to help promote voter access.

When voting by mail, the new law requires voters to write their driver's license number, personal identification number, or the last four digits of the social security number (whatever number they originally used to register) on the postal card form and envelope.  During the Brennan Center for Justice, an institute of law and politics without party affiliation, “the rule created a variety of new ways in which a voter’s application or ballot might be rejected through no fault of their own. For instance, if a voter had listed their driver’s license number when they registered to vote (which may have been over a decade ago) but put their Social Security number on the application or ballot, it would have been rejected”.

According to a study released October 20 by the same institution, mail requests from Asians, Latinos and black Texans were rejected at much higher rates than those of white voters.

“Although researchers couldn’t determine the exact cause of the disparities, experts and advocates say that in addition to the voting law’s restrictions, existing factors rooted in systemic racism, such as lack of resources in people’s native languages and other socioeconomic barriers, likely played a role in the high rejection rates”, according to the Texas Tribune.

According to the study, in the March primaries, 12,000 absentee ballots requests and more than 24,000 ballots by mail were rejected, leading to a 12% rejection rate statewide. This represented a significant increase over the previous ones. For example, the rejection rate for the 2020 presidential election was 1%.

The study shows that the rejection rate was higher for Asian voters, who were about 40% more likely to have their absentee ballot application rejected than white voters.  In addition, Asian and Latino voters were 50% more likely than white voters to have a ballot rejected due to a problem meeting the new SB 1 requirements.

Overall, 19% of Asian voters had their applications or ballots by mail rejected due to sb1 provisions, followed by 16.6% of black voters and 16.1% of Latino voters. For white voters, it was 12%.

“Absentee ballot rejection rates have been lower in Texas’ smaller elections since the March primary. The mail ballot rejection rate was at 5% for the May 7 constitutional amendment election, according to the secretary of state’s office. For the May 24 primary runoff elections, the statewide mail ballot rejection rate across both the Republican and Democratic primaries was 3.9%. Both of those elections, however, drew only a fraction of the voters who cast ballots in the primary”, the Texas Tribune story states.

Efforts by local Texas county election officials have contributed to the decrease in rejections.

“Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, said election officials have proactively included brightly colored paper inserts in mail ballots, reminding voters to include their ID numbers on the carrier envelopes”.

Election administrators are also making public utility announcements on local TV stations and talking to local newspapers, reminding voters of the demands.