Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Republican Judges Are Using Imaginary Voter Fraud to Empower Real Voter Suppression - Balls and Strikes
Balls and StrikesLast Tuesday, early voting began in the primary elections to choose nominees for Texas’s upcoming U.S. Senate race. One of the Republican candidates for that Senate seat, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, marked the occasion by publishing a “legal advisory” informing Texans that a host of normal election activities are actually crimes.
Texas effectively makes it illegal for you to encourage people to vote for a particular person or proposal if you’re in the vicinity of a ballot. Under state law, any in-person interaction that occurs “in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail” and is “intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” constitutes “vote harvesting services.” If you offer or receive “compensation” or some “other benefit” in exchange for such “services,” you face up to ten years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines.
“Other benefit” is a broad term, and local civic organizations fear that the law may cover a broad array of interactions. If a campaign gives its get-out-the-vote volunteers free t-shirts to wear while door-knocking, both the campaign and its volunteers may have broken the law. If a voter gives those volunteers a few glasses of water so they can keep knocking on doors in the Texas heat, that voter may have broken the law, too. “Vote harvesting is a felony,” Paxton’s advisory warns, in bolded text.
Texas’s ban on canvassing voters is one of a slew of measures that Republican legislators enacted in response to President Donald Trump’s repeated false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election. Local civic organizations filed a lawsuit in 2021 arguing that the law infringed their free speech and was impermissibly vague, violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments. In September 2024, federal district court judge Xavier Rodriguez agreed and struck down the law, noting that the canvassing restriction didn’t solve an “actual problem.” Rodriguez, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also found that Texas “failed to offer any evidence” that canvassers were confusing or improperly influencing voters, and that there was no evidence that existing limits on mail-in ballot assistance were insufficient to root out the “few alleged instances of misconduct” in the state.
Texas effectively makes it illegal for you to encourage people to vote for a particular person or proposal if you’re in the vicinity of a ballot. Under state law, any in-person interaction that occurs “in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail” and is “intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” constitutes “vote harvesting services.” If you offer or receive “compensation” or some “other benefit” in exchange for such “services,” you face up to ten years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines.
“Other benefit” is a broad term, and local civic organizations fear that the law may cover a broad array of interactions. If a campaign gives its get-out-the-vote volunteers free t-shirts to wear while door-knocking, both the campaign and its volunteers may have broken the law. If a voter gives those volunteers a few glasses of water so they can keep knocking on doors in the Texas heat, that voter may have broken the law, too. “Vote harvesting is a felony,” Paxton’s advisory warns, in bolded text.
Texas’s ban on canvassing voters is one of a slew of measures that Republican legislators enacted in response to President Donald Trump’s repeated false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election. Local civic organizations filed a lawsuit in 2021 arguing that the law infringed their free speech and was impermissibly vague, violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments. In September 2024, federal district court judge Xavier Rodriguez agreed and struck down the law, noting that the canvassing restriction didn’t solve an “actual problem.” Rodriguez, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also found that Texas “failed to offer any evidence” that canvassers were confusing or improperly influencing voters, and that there was no evidence that existing limits on mail-in ballot assistance were insufficient to root out the “few alleged instances of misconduct” in the state.
Another day, another Fifth Circuit voting rights opinion that sounds like a copy-paste from a conspiracy theory message board
— Balls & Strikes (@ballsandstrikes.org) 2026-02-24T17:12:16.381Z