New voter outreach proposal sparks another fight with Texas Republicans

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This article has been updated to clarify comments made by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt in both a published statement and an interview with Votebeat and The Texas Tribune.

Texas Republicans are clashing again with the state’s most populous county over voting. This time, they’re criticizing Harris County’s plan for outreach to eligible but unregistered voters ahead of the registration deadline.

County commissioners were set to consider the proposed outreach effort at a meeting Tuesday. But they took it off the agenda without explanation after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican, put out a statement describing the proposal as an “attempt to bypass” a law passed last year restructuring the county’s elections. Bettencourt’s statment claimed without evidence that the plan would “have a very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote.”

In an interview, Bettencourt said he objects to the county commissioners proposing the outreach after the Legislature passed a law last year eliminating the county’s election administrator position and assigning all election duties to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector.

“You should not have commissioners court instructing the voter registrar to do anything. That’s not their role,” Bettencourt told Votebeat, adding that under the new law, “they do not have any authority there.”

Texas law bars election officials from mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications — which is not part of the Harris County proposal. Mailing out unsolicited voter registration applications, which is part of the Harris County plan, is not against the law, but Bettencourt told Votebeat he’s asking the Texas Attorney General’s Office whether it should also be prohibited.

The Harris County proposal – first discussed at a commissioners court meeting on Aug. 6 — had multiple parts.

Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who brought up the item for discussion, aimed to use county data to identify areas where eligible but unregistered potential voters live, then contact them by text message and also mail them voter registration applications.

According to the proposal initially on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, the county administrator, the county attorney, and the tax assessor-collector departments would have been responsible for working together to carry out the plan.

Ellis later told Votebeat he pulled the proposal to improve it, especially “in the effective use of county resources to increase voter registration.” Ellis added that his office will continue to work with the tax assessor’s office “to develop a successful plan for greater registration and participation.”

When the item was first brought up on Aug. 6, Tom Ramsey, the sole Republican commissioner, said he opposed what he described as “a last-minute attempt to do voter outreach.” He said the tax assessor’s office should be the only county agency handling anything to do with voter registration.

“We spent a lot of effort in the Legislature to return responsibilities of voter registration and elections back to the county clerk and the tax assessor collector,” Ramsey said. “It appears to me we’re trying to reinvent a revamped elections administrator through the county administrator’s office.”

Harris County elections have been under scrutiny

The 2023 law restructuring the way elections are administered in Harris County was the result of a long series of skirmishes between the Republican-dominated Legislature and the heavily Democratic county over its elections, which have a history of problems.

In addition to turning election duties over to the county clerk’s office and voter registration duties to the county tax assessor-collector, another bill authored by Bettencourt gave the secretary of state authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed, but only in counties with more than 4 million people — that is, only Harris County.

Last week, the Secretary of State’s Office released an audit critical of the county’s failures to follow state-mandated rules and other procedures during its 2021 and 2022 elections, but noted that current officials, who didn’t oversee those elections, have worked to fix the problems. The state will send election inspectors to Harris County in November, the office said.

In a social media post Monday, Bettencourt said Harris County’s planned voter outreach would “result in very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote,” a claim he also made in his statement with Patrick. When asked if he had data to support the claim, Bettencourt directed Votebeat to recent numbers released by Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican.

Abbott’s numbers said 6,500 people identified as potential noncitizens were among the million people removed from the state’s voter rolls over a nearly three-year period. Voting rights groups are concerned, however, that the state incorrectly removed eligible voters. Bettencourt said sending out unsolicited voter registration applications creates more opportunities for people to make errors.

Update, Aug 29, 2024: Bettencourt also said in an interview his evidence that noncitizens would be very likely to register to vote through the county’s mailing was based on his experience as Harris County’s tax assessor-collector and registrar in 1998-2008, when he found 35 noncitizens who had tried to register to vote or were already on the voter rolls, whose registration and applications he canceled and rejected.

If voter registrations are mailed out, he said, “there’s no way for the tax office to say, ‘Oh, look, you’re not a citizen. You shouldn’t be doing this.’ That’s part of the problem,” he said.

There are important checks in the system, though. When voter registrars receive voter registration applications, they send them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, where they are checked for eligibility against Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration data. In addition, local voter registrars work with their county district attorney’s office to check citizenship status using responses from jury summons questionnaires.

Outreach effort approved in Travis County

For his part, Ramsey said on social media that the Harris County proposal was “a scheme to adversely affect voter outcome in the November election.” Ramsey did not respond to a request for comment on how the program would affect election outcomes.

In Travis County, another Democratic stronghold, officials have approved a program to identify new county residents who are eligible to vote but have not yet registered. Those voters will receive information on how to register and a voter registration application. The campaign does not include sending out text messages as the Harris County plan would. Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax assessor-collector told Votebeat that the program has not had any pushback from any state Republicans.

Bettencourt said he found out about the Travis County program only this week and does not know details of how it works.

Republican lawmakers have targeted Harris County efforts to promote voter registration and voter participation before. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the county sent out absentee mail-in ballot applications to eligible voters and provided 24-hour drive-thru voting. The following year, Republicans passed an overhaul of election laws that banned both of those activities in the state.

A ruling by a federal judge is pending on whether those changes — enacted through Senate Bill 1 — discriminate against people of color in Texas by making it harder for them to vote.