The Lone Star State has enacted some of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 
Brennan Center for Justice The Briefing
The Brennan Center will release the newest edition of our Voting Laws Roundup on Thursday. There’s a reason we keep close watch on efforts to restrict voting access — we are living in a time of historic flux, with some states moving to expand voting while others try to reduce access to the polls.
Texas is a case in point. When the state legislature passed Senate Bill 1 in late 2021, election experts warned that the law would keep people from voting. It erected barriers to early voting and voting by mail and reduced access to polling places. It placed significant new burdens on voters with disabilities and banned 24-hour and drive-through voting. It empowered partisan poll watchers to create disruptions at voting places, and it did so at the expense of poll workers, who already suffered threats of violence after the 2020 election. The Brennan Center called S.B. 1 “one of the cruelest and most aggressive restrictive voting bills to become law.”
The bad thing doesn’t always happen, but this time it did. The March primaries were the first statewide election held under S.B. 1, and the state rejected more than 24,000 mail-in ballots for failure to comply with the new law’s abstruse and unnecessary administrative requirements. In order to have their votes counted, Texans had to place either a portion of their Social Security number or their driver’s license number on both the mail ballot application and the ballot return envelope, and the number had to match their voter record.
A whopping 12 percent of mail ballots were rejected for failing to satisfy the requirements — a 12-fold increase in the rejection rate for mail-in ballots from 2020. In some counties, the initial rejection rate reached 40 percent, with only a portion of those ballots eventually corrected and rightfully counted. It was a mass disenfranchisement that did nothing to make elections more secure. And these are only the disenfranchisements we can prove — no one knows how many voters sat out the election because of S.B. 1’s raft of restrictive measures.
The disastrous and unjustifiable S.B. 1 is one of several laws the Texas legislature passed under the influence of election denial and the delusion of a “stolen” presidential election. H.B. 3920 states that the only disabilities that entitle a citizen to vote by mail are those that physically prevent a trip to the polls. S.B. 1111 added administrative hurdles to the registration process, imposing a proof of residency requirement that would effectively disenfranchise certain voters, such as part-time and off-campus college students.
Texas also enacted an extreme partisan gerrymander that insulates Republican rule against voter dissatisfaction. Under the new map, Democrats would have to win 58 percent of the popular vote in order to be favored to carry more than 37 percent of the state’s congressional seats. Put differently, even if Texas turned dark blue, Republicans could hold a two-to-one advantage in the state’s congressional caucus.
The gerrymandered map is particularly unfair to voters of color. For example, the map surgically divides Fort Bend County near Houston, where nonwhite voters have gradually grown to majority status. Rather than competing for these votes, the Republican-dominated legislature broke the county into bits to minimize the voting power of communities of color. 
The trends in Texas are deeply troubling. The party in power has spent years entrenching itself, diminishing its accountability and selectively disempowering and disenfranchising huge swaths of the state’s voters. The 2022 election will be played on a field deliberately designed to favor one party.
The fight isn’t over. The Brennan Center is representing a coalition of advocacy groups and several Black, Asian, and Latino Texas voters challenging the legality of Texas’s gerrymandered map. We’re also suing to block portions of the notorious S.B. 1. And there is plenty more to do, organizing those who stand up for democracy on the ground in the nation’s second most populous and second fastest growing state. 
I’ll be in Texas next week, meeting with officials, advocates, and journalists to talk about the threats and opportunities facing the state’s democracy. The face of Texas is changing, and we’re going to help bring political change to match.

 
How the Supreme Court’s New Gerrymandering Case Threatens the Voting Rights Act
Today the Supreme Court heard a redistricting case out of Alabama that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act. For decades, voters of color have been able to challenge discriminatory congressional maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In Merrill v. Milligan, Alabama is asking the Court to radically rewrite the rules for such claims. In a new explainer, Michael Li and Yurij Rudensky break down the details of the case. “A decision from the Supreme Court agreeing to Alabama’s far-reaching relief could make it harder for minority voters to challenge maps that dilute their political strength and deprive long-disadvantaged minority communities of strong advocates on critical public investments and issues like healthcare, education, and criminal justice,” they write. Read more
SCOTUS Rulings Last Term Show What to Look For Next
The Supreme Court's new supermajority has made clear that judicial restraint won’t stand in the way of the conservative legal movement’s goals. Madiba Dennie identifies how three key behaviors to implement them emerged last term: disregarding precedents, deciding issues not presented in the cases, and strict adherence to originalism. “It’s dangerous for the Supreme Court to rely on power rather than principle,” she writes. “Reasoned decision-making to protect Americans’ constitutional rights is central to public trust and judicial legitimacy.” Read more
BOOK REVIEW: Hope for a Justice System That Is Truly Just
Many recent books have highlighted the overwhelming harms of America’s reliance on mass incarceration. What’s Prison For?, a new book by Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times and founding editor of the Marshall Project, explores how large-scale changes could transform our prisons and jails to prioritize rehabilitation over punishment. “It’s rare to finish the last page of a book on the criminal legal system with hope, and one does walk away with a sense that even just one person can positively impact lives of those behind bars,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen writes in a book review. See below for information about an upcoming virtual event with Keller Thursday. Read more
Protections in Place Against Rogue Poll Workers
Proponents of the false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” are recruiting fellow Big Lie supporters to be poll workers. Many states have laws protecting elections, and although they vary across the country, there are common themes in insulating voting, ballot counting, and other election processes from attempts at interference. The Brennan Center and All Voting is Local have released seven state-specific guides for election officials that explain the legal safeguards in place to prevent a poll worker from disrupting the voting process. The guides also detail actions under the law that election officials can take to prevent or stop a poll worker from interfering in elections. Read more

 
Coming Up
 
Thursday, October 6 // 6–7 p.m. ET
 
With roughly 2 million people behind bars, America’s prison system doesn’t exactly have a reputation for empathy — but could that change? Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Keller has spent years examining what is possible if prisons focus on preparing the incarcerated to be good citizens when they return to society, which the overwhelming majority will. In his new book, What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration, he shows us how we can reform our prisons and why there’s a reason for cautious optimism. Rehabilitation, he argues, is not only an investment in public safety but a moral imperative. Keller will be joined by moderator Jason D. Williamson, executive director of NYU Law School’s Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law. RSVP today
 
Produced in partnership with New York University’s John Brademas Center
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News
  • Elizabeth Goitein on the Oath Keepers’ “absurd” legal defense // USA TODAY
  • Kevin Morris on the racial turnout gap in Georgia elections // AMERICAN PROSPECT
  • Ian Vandewalker on the dangers of putting election deniers in charge of election administration // GUARDIAN
  • Joanna Zdanys on the impact of big money in Massachusetts’s attorney general race // WBUR

 
 
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
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