Texas Republicans' Resistance to Mail-In Voting Has Strong Roots in Pre-Pandemic Politics

While it’s easy to dismiss Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s charge that extending voting-by-mail in Texas is “a scam by the Democrats to steal the election” as just another calculated provocation packaged for the Fox News audience and the President, an accumulated body of polling illustrates that Patrick’s bad vibrations resonate with a large swath of Republican voters deeply suspicious of any efforts to make it easier to vote. The thorough politicization of the laws governing the voting process is deeply rooted in attitudes in the electorate among both Republican and Democratic voters. The result is that an opportunity to find common cause at the crossroads of public health and civic aspiration has instead devolved into endless trips to court amidst a dispiriting replay of the long history of turning the franchise into something more akin to extracting back pay from a stingy boss than exercising a constitutional right.

Partisan predispositions toward any efforts to ease the rules governing the voting process, even in perilous public health conditions, were evident in attitudes toward expanding mail-in voting captured in the April 2020 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. That poll, conducted in the early stages of the legal battles that have Democrats, their allies, and attorney general Ken Paxton Zooming between several virtual courts, found 55% of Texas voters favoring “allowing all Texans to vote by mail in the upcoming 2020 general election in response to the coronavirus/COVID-19.” Beneath that finding of majority support, 86% of Democrats but only 29% of Republicans favored voting by mail. A majority of Republicans, 59%, opposed it.

These attitudes will be deeply familiar to anyone who has followed the seemingly endless war within institutions like the Texas legislature and the courts over Republican-led efforts ostensibly designed to protect the sanctity of the electoral process even as they impeded registration and voting in a state that already has one of the lowest turnout rates among the 50 states. This war has taken place on many fronts, including: the star-crossed effort to implement voter ID requirements that sanctified concealed carry licenses but disqualified college ID’s; botched efforts to purge voter rolls; the elimination of mobile voter locations; increasingly stringent requirements for deputy registrars; resisting online voter registration; and downplaying or even denying clear evidence of foreign attempts to subvert the process in 2016. While the basic policy positions underlying all of these efforts have become an assumed part of politics, the breadth and clarity of the pattern is striking when you look at its overall arc over the last 20 years.  Republicans have opposed efforts to make voting easier, in many cases actively seeking to achieve the opposite. Democrats have learned to view any GOP attempts at altering the voting process with suspicion if not outright cynicism, assuming that in the absence of such efforts, they accrue a natural advantage.

The entrenched positions of elected partisans are reflected in attitudes among partisan voters evident across several years of University of Texas/Texas Tribune polling:

• 30% of Republicans said that voters knowingly break election laws “frequently” in June 2019, compared to 9% of Democrats.
• 42% of Republicans said that non-citizens vote in Texas elections “frequently” in June 2019, compared to 6% of Democrats.
• 31% of Democrats said that eligible voters are prevented from voting “frequently” in June 2019, compared to 5% of Republicans.
• 77% of Democrats supported online voter registration in June 2018, compared to 41% of Republicans.
• 77% of Democrats said that the outcome of the 2016 election was influenced by Russia in February 2018, 81% of Republicans said that it wasn’t.  

The partisanship in these attitudes shouldn’t give way to false equivalency. Republicans’ emphasis on isolated prosecutions for voter fraud may enable talk of a “zero tolerance” policy among defenders of election integrity, but the incidents of voter fraud and non-citizen voting are at best infinitesimal as a share of the Texas electorate. The page for the AG’s “election integrity” initiative at the OAG website trumpets the meager returns on their efforts in big red boxes. Per that site, since 2004, the AG’s office has successfully prosecuted 457 cases of voter fraud in Texas, which might sound like a lot until you consider that Texans have cast more than 92 million votes (92,552,191) in statewide elections, constitutional amendment elections, and Democratic and Republican Primaries and run-offs in that period. So according to the attorney general’s website, of those 92 million votes, approximately 0.000494% were found to be fraudulent. 

Nor should one think that it’s likely that the voter fraud that does exist alters election outcomes. Even if we were to consider the possibility (for the purpose of illustration) that 500 fraudulent votes were cast all at once in the 2018 election in which Ted Cruz defeated Beto O’Rourke at the top of the ticket by a razor thin margin (by Texas standards), 2.56 points, those 500 votes would only account for 0.0060% of all votes cast. If they had all been cast fraudulently for O’Rourke (again, solely for illustration), Ted Cruz’s margin of victory would have fallen from 2.56 points to...2.554 points. This isn’t to say that voter fraud doesn’t matter, or that the perception of fraud (real or imagined) doesn’t harm civic trust. But Texas has chosen to prioritize efforts to stop the seemingly inconsequential behavior of a miniscule fraction of the voting population while more than 7 million registered Texans failed to cast a ballot in the high turnout 2018 election (47% of all registered voters).

On the specific subject of expanding voting by mail in response to the pandemic, a look at the varying partisanship of registered voter groups by age underlines why, given the rarity of actual voter fraud (by mail or otherwise), GOP statewide officials and their allies in the legislature (currently sidelined, but ultimately responsible for passing these laws) are evincing no interest in making it as easy for people under 65 to vote during the pandemic as it is for people over 65. Simply put, voters 65 and older are much more likely to be Republican than are voters younger than 65. 

Averaging the partisan identification of groups of voters over a number of surveys provides a more precise estimate of their partisanship than the responses to a single survey, so we rely here on the long time series provided by the UT/TT Poll. Among voters over the age of 65, an average of 57% identify as Republicans across 14 surveys from February 2016 to April 2020, compared to 44% of registered voters under the age of 65. In their 2020 election preferences, 58% of registered voters 65 or older also said that they would be supporting Donald Trump in his reelection efforts against Joe Biden, compared to 47% of voters younger than 65 in the most recent UT/TT poll in April.

One might object that more parsing of the age brackets makes the GOP advantage in blocking mail-in voting less clear. The polling data also shows that voters between the ages of 45 and 64 are an asset to the Republican Party in Texas. Among these middle-age voters, Republicans enjoy a 9-point advantage in party identification (49% to 40%). Making it easier for this group to vote without risking Coronavirus exposure and infection might help Republicans, particularly given the risk factors among voters in this age bracket (e.g. heart disease, hypertension, obesity). But lowering the cost (in broad terms) of voting for this group, which already has comparatively high turnout rates, especially among demographic groups likely to vote Republican, is unlikely to yield many additional GOP votes. 

Among younger voting cohorts, however, there are likely to be more Democratic leaning blocs of voters that Republican officials seeking to limit the expansion of mail-in voting are unlikely to want to help. Democrats enjoy a 7 percentage point party identification advantage among 30-44 year olds, and a 16-point advantage among 18-29 year olds. Texas has one of the youngest populations in the country; even removing non-voters under 18 from consideration finds approximately half the population under 45 (51%), and half over 45 (49%). But exit polling data found 61% of those voting in 2018 to be over the age of 45, compared to 39% under the age of 44. Given the partisan predispositions described above, Republican elected officials, desiring to remain elected, have no electoral incentive to do anything that might bring the age distribution of voters more in line with the overall population. In fact, the opposite is more immediately beneficial in an increasingly competitive state.

None of these partisan or demographic considerations were on the table on May 20 when the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments related to the state’s request to prohibit county clerks and election administrators “from misinforming the public...and improperly approving applications for mail-in ballots”, though they hovered over the proceedings. The (elected) Texas Supreme Court ruled a week later that lacking immunity to COVID-19 was not a disability or physical condition that, considered alone, qualified one to vote by mail. However, they also rejected the state’s account that a handful of county clerks were promoting this interpretation, and agreed that “a voter can take into consideration aspects of his health and his health history that are physical conditions in deciding whether, under the circumstances, to apply to vote by mail because of disability.”

First and foremost, no one should obscure the practical consequences of the court leaving it up to the voter to make their own judgments about personal health risks, and holding that current law does not require county clerks or election administrators to question that judgment (given that there is no provision in statute to do so). This invites voters to request mail in ballots by simply checking a box on a form, and calls for local officials to fulfil those requests without questioning the voters’ judgments. 

The element of the Texas Supreme Court’s decision that received the most attention in press coverage is their conclusion that lacking immunity to COVID-19 does not constitute a physical condition that “renders a voter eligible to vote by mail” within the existing statute. But it’s at least as consequential that their ruling also landed the legal fight at the state level in the midst of another political hotspot, the ongoing efforts of state government to exercise authority over local governments in Texas’ major urban areas.

Though his effort failed to persuade a majority of the court to lean on the county clerks, the Attorney General’s request that the court force local election officials to enforce narrow limits on voting by mail, along with the misrepresentation of the actions of local officials in that request (which the court drolly noted), illustrate the state leadership’s continued determination to overrule local authorities. The partisan dimension is clear in polling data: The party identification of urban registered voters under 65, averaged across those 14 UT/TT polls, was 57% Democratic and only 31% Republican. Activating the politics of the state vs. local fight into the dicussion of mail-in voting only further stymies efforts to unify political leaders and the public in a coordinated, rational and sustained effort to contain the spread of the virus – or to address the economic crisis accompanying it.  

Even without the additional irritant of the state vs. local conflict, the public is already starkly divided along partisan lines where the expansion of voting meets attitudes toward containing the spread of the virus. Looking again at April UT/TT Poll data, among those between 45 and 64 years old, 50% express being extremely or very concerned about contracting the virus, but with many more Democrats (53%) than Republicans (37%) reporting this concern. Not surprisingly, within this group, 69% favor expanding mail-in voting. Among those in the same age group who say that they are not concerned about contracting the virus, Republicans are much more numerous (78%) than Democrats (17%), and 62% of this subgroup oppose voting by mail. Thus among Republicans who are concerned about contracting the virus, many still oppose expanding voting by mail, even though they are in an age group that would be able to take advantage of the change in response to their health concerns. Among the much larger number of Republicans who are not concerned about contracting the virus, a large share, unburdened by health concerns, are likely guided by their pre-existing partisan rejection of any loosening of voting rules. 

These reinforcing partisan dispositions at the intersection of voting and public health can be expected to fuel still more starkly partisan efforts by GOP elected officials to prevent the expansion of mail-in voting in response to public health concerns. While the course of COVID-19 in the state remains unclear, the generally optimistic messaging by state leaders (as well as their national figurehead, the President) as part of the effort to sustain a restarting of economic activity is likely to continue — and is likely, in turn, to reinforce the growing tendency of Republican voters to experience less urgent perceptions of the pandemic, and thus more impatience with containment measures. To the extent that expanding access to mail-in ballots is justified as part of such containment efforts, there’s little reason to expect Republican leaders in the state or their voters to change course in the name of public health. In this circumstance, at least, they've done the math.