Quick! Can you produce your birth certificate? Do you have a passport, either current or expired, that you can find right now? You better, or you just might not be able to vote this November.
Legislators who want to show you that they are “tough” on immigrants often try to prove it by making it harder to vote, since their premise is that Democrats want to let undocumented people flow into the country and vote for Democrats.
First, may we please dismiss the silly idea that undocumented immigrants will be voting illegally in our Presidential contest? Our dangerous/comical representative Chip Roy, a leader of the far-right “Freedom” caucus, has introduced a law disallowing this practice. He and others get very outraged at this injustice and want you to be outraged also.
After five minutes of fact-checking, you may realize two important things: 1) voting in federal elections by non-citizens has been illegal since 1924. In addition, in 1996, Congress made noncitizen voting in federal elections a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment; and 2) illegal immigrants are generally not eager to call attention to themselves by showing up at a polling place and being asked to provide identification. So actual cases of voting by illegal immigrants are exceedingly rare.
In other words, Chip Roy, along with Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, are seeking attention and gratitude for fighting a demon that is non-existent, in the hopes that doing so will define them as tough on voter fraud in the minds of voters who are not inclined to fact-check. Paxton has asked for a budget increase for his voter fraud unit this year, after spending millions last year pursuing a handful of cases, most of which did not result in convictions. And he will probably get the money.
To recap the gradual expansion of the pool of legal voters, let’s start with white male property owners. These are the guys who wrote the Constitution, so they figured that should do it, enough said. That was in 1787, but by the first half of the 1800’s the white men without property got a seat at the table. It was still not a very big table.
Black men got to join the group of voters in 1870, and women followed soon after (that’s sarcastic, it took fifty years). Native Americans became voters in 1924; residents of Washington, D.C. in 1961; youth between age 18 and 21 became eligible in 1971. Citizens of US Territories, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, are not allowed to vote in our Presidential elections even though they are US citizens, unless they move to one of the fifty states. It’s complicated!
Up until the early 2000’s, laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 were designed to make it easier for people to register and vote. But over the last twenty years, various states have been enacting laws designed to limit voter fraud that seem to be more effective at limiting voting in general, especially by marginalized groups such as the poor, the elderly, and minorities.
One might argue that Republicans, when in power in a given state, will lean towards restricting ballot accessibility to any group that might be more likely to vote Democratic. High-density urban counties were limited to one mail-in ballot drop box per county, the same as their sparsely populated rural cousins. Absentee, mail-in and early voting have all seen restrictions in recent years.
Another method of restricting voting is the purging of voter rolls. Our Governor just last week proudly announced that over 1 million voters had been dropped from registration rolls in the past year. He didn’t tell you this is not an unusual phenomenon, and that over half those people had died or moved. And he also didn’t tell you thousands of names were removed because the person failed to respond to requests for updated information. He just wanted it to sound like he was tough on voter fraud, the little problem that isn’t there.
I volunteered at the local polls in 2020, and I must tell you that there was such precision and double-checking that you might not be allowed to vote if there was even a small discrepancy in your name or address between your voter registration and your driver’s license. Even then, you would cast what’s called a provisional ballot, which means it would be examined by voting officials after the polls closed to see if it would be counted. You’d have to be a pretty clever criminal to cast your one little vote fraudulently.
Most important now is that you make sure you didn’t fall through one of those cracks, whether they were deliberately placed in your path or got there by accident. Go to CanIVote. org, the user-friendly website of the state of Texas, and follow the steps to either register or change your address, as well as find your polling place and get information about absentee and early voting. I went as soon as I read about it, to be sure everything was okay, and that I hadn’t failed to respond to an email from Governor Abbott. The deadline to register is October 7. Are you in?
Please vote! Get a bunch of friends together and go vote early and then have lunch. I don’t even care who you vote for. I just know that the more of us who vote, the more We the People have made our mark on our country and its future, in a free and fair election.
Susan Hull is a retired clinical psychologist, a horse trainer and an Independent voter. She is thrilled at the possibility that even one person may decide to register or to vote because of her nagging. She hopes her readers will humor her.
