NYT:

More than 18,000 voters in Texas’ most populous counties had their mail-in ballots rejected in the state’s primary election this month, according to a review of election data by The New York Times, a surge in thrown-out votes that disproportionately affected Black people in the state’s largest county and revealed the impact of new voting regulations passed by Republicans last year.

In Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s most populous county, areas with large Black populations were 44 percent more likely to have ballots rejected than heavily white areas, according to a review of census survey data and election results by the Harris County election administrator’s office.

The analysis also found that Black residents made up the largest racial group in six of the nine ZIP codes with the most ballot rejections in the county.

The thousands of ballot rejections, and the racial disparity in rejections in Harris County, provide the clearest evidence yet that the major voting law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature has prevented significant numbers of people from voting.

The rejection rate in the state’s most populous counties was roughly 15 percent. By comparison, during the 2020 general election, nearly one million absentee ballots were cast statewide and just under 9,000 were thrown out, a rejection rate of roughly 1 percent.

The numbers in Harris County, which has over 4.7 million residents, also appeared to substantiate Democratic warnings that Black voters would face the brunt of the new regulations.

The Texas law was part of a wave of similar voting measures passed by Republicans last year. The early effects in Texas could foreshadow future elections in the 18 other states, including major battlegrounds like Georgia, that tightened their balloting rules after the 2020 election.

“We have concrete evidence of the impact that it is having on primarily people of color,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston, the second Black mayor in the city’s history and a Democrat, said in an interview. “People’s right to vote is being taken away. It’s almost like the 21st-century version of the poll tax, so to speak, when they were asked, ‘How many bubbles are in this bar of soap?’”