Spurred by false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Texas enacted a voting law in 2021 with many egregious provisions. These ranged from new limits on assistance for voters with disabilities or language-access needs to the criminalization of election administrators who encourage mail voting. We cannot yet know the full impact of Senate Bill 1, let alone how it may exacerbate the restrictive voting system Texas had in place before the law’s passage. But data from the March primary shows that just one of the bill’s many provisions caused massive disenfranchisement and major racial disparities.
Under that new rule, voters were required to write their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number on their mail ballot application and mail ballot envelope. Whichever number they listed needed to match the number on file in their state voter registration. The rule created a variety of new ways in which a voter’s application or ballot might be rejected through no fault of their own. For instance, if a voter had listed their driver’s license number when they registered to vote (which may have been over a decade ago) but put their Social Security number on the application or ballot, it would have been rejected.
As reporting from this spring made clear, absentee applications and mail ballots were rejected at extremely high levels. These reports — relying primarily on aggregate, high-level data or data from a small handful of counties — showed that some 12,000 applications and 25,000 ballots were rejected during the March primary and that there were “signs of a race gap.”
While the early reporting pointed to the magnitude of the problem, thanks to a public records request filed by the Brennan Center, we now know more about which particular voters’ applications and ballots were rejected. We obtained individual-level data listing whether each voter in the state requested a mail ballot, whether that request was rejected, and if so, why it was rejected, and whether every voter cast a mail ballot, whether it was rejected, and if so, why it was rejected.
Our analysis of the data yielded troubling results. We found that the overwhelming majority of ballot rejections were due to the new ID number requirements imposed by S.B. 1 and that Latino, Asian, and Black voters were significantly more likely to have their mail ballot applications rejected than white voters. We also found that even when voters successfully applied to vote by mail, voters of color were far more likely to have their mail ballots rejected. This combination of application and mail ballot rejections left nonwhite voters at least 30 percent more likely to have an application or mail ballot rejected than white voters….