In Texas, Republicans fight voting by mail expansion while encouraging their voters to use it
Standing in front of a blue curtain adorned with the seal of the Republican Party of Texas, Allen West offered up what he deemed an “instructional video” for Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins.
It had been a week since Hollins had announced his office would send an application for a mail-in ballot to every registered voter in the county — all 2.4 million of them. Since then, his plans had sparked alarm among top state Republicans, leading to two lawsuits meant to halt it before he could get the applications out.
Purporting to detail the difference between what Hollins, a Democrat, wanted to pursue and “what is really lawful,” West — who recently took the reins of the Texas GOP — inaccurately claimed Democrats were pursuing a “wanton mailing out of ballots.”
“There’s a wrong way and there’s a right way,” West said, touting the GOP’s approach of contacting voters and reminding them to send in their applications.
In reality, Hollins was merely sending applications for a mail-in ballot — something West’s own party has done for years. In recent weeks, voters across the state have been finding in their mailboxes unsolicited applications to request absentee ballots. Some of those mailers — depicting images of President Donald Trump — were from the Republican Party of Texas that West chairs.
As states across the country scramble to make voting safer in a pandemic, Texas is in the small minority of those requiring voters who want to cast their ballots by mail to present an excuse beyond the risk of contracting the coronavirus at polling places. But the ongoing attempts by the White House to sow doubt over the reliability of voting by mail has left Texas voters in a blur of cognitive dissonance. Local officials are being reprimanded by the state’s Republican leadership for attempting to proactively send applications for mail-in ballots, while the people doing the scolding are still urging their voters to fill them out.
What was once a lightly used and largely uncontroversial voting option in Texas — one even Republicans relied on — is now the crux of the latest fight over who gets to vote and, equally as crucial in a pandemic, who has access to safe voting.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/04/texas-republicans-vote-by-mail/
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