Texas Says It All
In Texas they made it clear. They said the real meaning “out loud”. They were voting to preserve the “purity” of the ballot. For anyone with an understanding of the history of racism in the United States, the word “purity” is loaded with intent. There was “purity” of the slave-owning Founding Fathers, the “purity” of the Southern Cause in the Civil War, and maintaining the “purity” of the white race. And the original, most insidious use of the word, maintaining the “purity” of white women, supposedly so “vulnerable” to defilement by Black men. So they said, and used the word “purity” to try to maintain first slavery, then the Black Codes, the Jim Crow Laws, and now the White Supremacist organizations that purport to defend American “purity”. Lynching was about “purity”.
And who was voting for “ ballot purity”? The 2021 Texas State Legislature, voted for a law supporting additional restrictions on the voting process. They claimed to be protecting the “security” of the vote from their own made-up threats of voter falsification. They created a false problem to pursue a malevolent solution. There is no voter fraud, no ballots brought in from Asia with bamboo in the paper, no “Big Lie” numbers added into the counts of inner-city precincts. But because they’ve invented these problems – they are going to solve them. That solution is to take action to keep people of color from voting. They want the ballot pure – purely for White people that is.
Not Fooled
To folks in the suburbs (like me) some of these solutions seem to be “no big deal”. So you have to re-request absentee ballots for each election. And the “drop boxes” for early voting will only be open on weekdays during business hours. Oh, and they won’t be boxes, there will be one per county – even if the county contains Dallas, a city of 2.63 million. And there will be less early voting days, and fewer locations to vote.
It doesn’t seem like a big deal – until you deal with the economics. Let’s think about a hard working single mom, whose got a day-job: forty hours a week plus overtime. She’s already struggling – paying a big chunk of her paycheck for daycare costs for the kids. So trying to get to the polls on election day – well that’s a tough process. She doesn’t get a “day off” for voting, and she can’t get it done on her thirty minute lunch break. The polls are farther away from her home, “consolidated for ballot security and efficiency”. And they close earlier, making it even harder to get there.
To the Polls
So early voting is good for her – as long as the early voting have hours that aren’t her working hours. Restricting those days and hours makes it tougher – and you can’t take the kids to stand in line for hours. And since those ballot locations are fewer, it requires public transportation. That’s an actual financial cost – a form of poll tax in reality. And one “banker’s hours” drop off box – for all of Dallas? What the likelihood that she can get to that?
So she should vote absentee – mailing the ballot in. But Texas has increased scrutiny of ballot signatures, allowing workers to compare the ballot envelope signature to any past signature on file with the state. Think about that, an early signature from a new young voter might be compared to one signed on a ballot twenty years later. It makes it more likely that an untrained election worker might throw out a legal ballot. And if that happens – there is no legal recourse for the voter, no appeal process (but, if the voter has internet access, they can track the ballot to see its been tossed).
Who Is Impacted
These kind of voting laws make it harder for everyone to vote. But they are deceptive in that the impact of those laws are much greater on folks with lower incomes, and in fact, people of color. And since people of color are much less likely to vote for Republicans – well we know the real “purity” the legislators of Texas are trying to get.
Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas: the litany of voter “integrity” measures rolls on. But here in Ohio, with the election machinery already dominated by Republican appointees, you might think that we’d be above all of that. But then there’s this:
“Legislation introduced in the Ohio House calls for prohibiting placement of ballot drop boxes anywhere but at a local elections office, eliminating a day of early voting, shortening the window for requesting mail-in ballots and tightening voter ID requirements” (AP).
I guess some Republican legislators in Ohio who think we need more “purity” here too.
Et Tu, Ohio?
