Why the Texas Voting Bill Matters

by Matthew Cannelora

The new Texas voting Bill, currently in suspended animation, threatens who can vote in Texas. It also shows us a warning about how messaging can be used to disenfranchise anyone not in power.

The Voting Bill

We call ourselves the ‘land of the free.’ It’s in our National Anthem, and we constantly hear the phrase ‘free and fair elections.’ The ability to vote, and to have one’s voice heard, helps define our freedoms, and helps us to keep our freedoms when they’re threatened. But it is a curious case in modern American politics that the ability to vote has become politicized. On the one hand, our country touts its democratic ideals. On the other hand, we are not a democracy, but a republic. That distinction matters—Electoral College pieces forthcoming from The Blue Cavalry. In the case of the new Texas Voting Bill (SB 7), however, the idea of each person’s voice has become more than an academic exercise. Quite beyond how much each voice matters, this bill threatens to keep certain voices from being heard at all.

Opponents of the voting bill, such as the Texas Democrats who recently walked out of the legislative session to stop the passage, say that “the Texas legislation will make it harder to vote for groups long marginalized in the state.” This argument holds water, even from casual observation. After all, the bill restricts voting hours, and prohibits ballot drop boxes and drive-through voting. One may well imagine that a working single parent may find it difficult to go to a voting center between these restricted hours. And one may also imagine that if that same person cannot drop their ballot off after hours in a secure box, then they might not be able to vote at all.

But let’s move beyond the imagination. Is there any evidence that voting bills such as SB 7 actually infringe on anyone’s ability to vote? In an article by fivethirtyeight.com, the simple answer is, Yes. The more difficult it is to vote, the less people vote. The issue is thoroughly discussed in their article, so I won’t attempt to summarize it. I doubt, though, that even people who approve of the voting bill in Texas would argue the point that restrictive voting bills make it harder to vote.

After all, that is their stated goal. Proponents of the most recent wave of voting bills are plain and vocal about why they are authoring and supporting these bills: they think there has been or could be widespread voter fraud. And so they want to restrict who can vote, how they can vote, and when they can vote. They claim that these measures will make elections safer. But where’s the evidence that our ballots need protecting?

Is there Fraud? Has there ever been Fraud?

On their website, heritage.org cites 1,328 instances of voter fraud. That seems like a significant number, especially if someone reading that is from a small town of only a few thousand residents. But we had over 140 million people vote in the last presidential election. Even if every single one of those 1,328 instances of voter fraud occurred in this election cycle, that would account for 9 ten-thousandths of a percent, if my math is correct. Give or take a decimal, we’re not anywhere near levels that could have thrown the election.

And if we dig deeper into heritage.org’s numbers, we find that their database has collated that number of 1,328 from records going back to at least 1982. That is to say, their citation of 1,328 instances of proven fraud are not from this election cycle—they are from every election cycle going back almost 40 years.Taking this into account, the percentage of fraudulent votes in a given cycle drops below a point that even a statistician could find relevance in calculating. To give the figures some context, if those instances of voting fraud are averaged out over only the national election cycles, that would be 63 fraudulent votes per cycle.

If this bill works to perfection, and every single fraudulent vote in the next cycle occurs in Texas, SB 7 will prevent roughly 63 people from committing voter fraud.

So if the Texas voting bill won’t prevent any real, meaningful election fraud, what purpose could it possibly serve?

What Restrictive Voting Bills Really Do

People on the Left of this issue have said that voting rights restrictions are an insidious plot to disenfranchise people of color and the poor. People on the Right of this issue have said that opposing these bills is an insidious plot to hand open ballots to illegal immigrants, felons, foreign adversaries, and intentionally fraudulent voters. But if, as I’ve shown, there is no real voting fraud, then what are these bills doing? Is there a plot to disenfranchise people in our populace?

The scary truth is that our history is full of people in power trying to keep it by restricting who can vote, and how they can vote. In recent times, the Republican party has used the illusory threat, the boogeyman of voting fraud to scare their base into supporting voter suppression laws.

A person doesn’t need a history book or access to a research database to know that the ability to vote has been restricted in this country since its founding. Whether restricted to men, or to people that hold property, or restricted to people who are white. And a person doesn’t need a history book or research database to know that over the course of our 250 year history, many of those restrictions have been explicitly banned. We have ratified Amendments to the Constitution to make sure that women and previously enslaved persons could vote. And it is a sad fact that both Amendments met with resistance.

Which leaves one to wonder, if the country was really founded on such high-minded democratic ideals as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, why have we had to work so hard to guarantee in writing that such large blocks of our populace can vote? If there were no powers trying to disenfranchise our populace, why would we need constitutional amendments to protect against that disenfranchisement?

It is because there are people and organizations who want to limit who can vote. In fact, it may surprise many readers to know that for much of America’s history, non-citizen aliens were freely welcomed to vote in America. But when those non-citizens started voting away from the conservative norm, people on that side of the aisle started raising a hew and cry about restricting the right to vote to citizens. While some municipalities have tried to move the needle back to giving all persons the right to vote, the push back has been that that violates some deep-seated American tradition of citizen-only voting. There is no such tradition, however. In fact, the restriction of voting to citizens is found nowhere in our National Constitution, and only in the last hundred years became codified at the various State levels.

Joseph Stalin said that “Political power does not rest with those who cast votes; political power rests with those who count votes.” Texas Republicans have now found themselves following the dictator’s advice.

We should all be wary of when those already in power, such as the Republicans in Texas, want to pass new laws on how votes are cast and counted. Right now, the political power in Texas rests with the Republicans, and they are taking a page out of Stalin’s book by trying to ensure they stay the ones in control of counting votes.

Why it Matters to Everyone, Not Just Texans

Democrats in opposition to the bill in Texas recently staged a walk-out. By leaving the legislative chamber in Texas, they were able to temporarily forestall a vote on the bill. But, if it goes to a vote, the Republicans have the seats to force it through. In the interim, the Texas Democrats have taken to the national stage. They have gone on the national media, on social media, and they have taken themselves physically to Washington, D.C. to lobby federal lawmakers to pass sweeping voter-protection legislation that would supersede the restrictive Texas bill, among others.

And they have done this because the Texas voting bill is only one of over two hundred that have come up in over forty states to restrict voting. Republicans have dramatized a lie that we need voter restrictions to prevent heinous voting fraud. And they are using that narrative to restrict who can vote, and how the votes are counted. For as long as we, the American populace, allow those in power to determine how they count our votes, we endanger our own ability to be counted. We threaten our own voices by not using them to oppose this Texas bill, now.

To protect our voices, we need to join the Texas Democrats, and lobby all federal lawmakers to pass a comprehensive voting rights bill. Bills like the one in Texas pave the way back to an America where only the landed white men can vote. And that’s not a land of the free.