Pasadena resident Shannah Becker, 29, attempted to cast her ballot at a polling station on election day last month but was denied entry.
She mailed in her voter registration application one day after the deadline of October 7, even though she had already filed it in early October.
“I was really disappointed,” Becker remarked. They just said, “Unfortunately, no,” when I inquired whether there was anything further I could do to keep my right to vote. Many people, in my opinion, were unaware of the deadline until it was too near or even past.
Becker was one of 21,026 Harris County citizens who registered after the cutoff time, disqualifying them from casting ballots in the presidential election scheduled for November 5. 3,701 of those registrations were registered on Election Day, according to the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office.
Those newly registered voters may have changed the outcome of 13 countywide elections where the winning margin was less than 21,000 votes if they had been able to cast ballots.
However, the effect on the countywide turnout rate would have been smaller: if all of those registrants had been able to cast ballots, Harris County’s overall turnout would have climbed by less than a percentage point.
Ten states, including Texas, have a 30-day voter registration deadline prior to an election. Voters can register and cast their ballots on the same day in 23 states, including Wyoming and California. On election day, citizens in twenty of those states can register.
County efforts
Voter registration is handled by the county tax office, which strives to increase the number of people on the rolls all year long. The office received almost 5,500 voter registrations on October 7, the day before the elections on November 5.
RELATED: This year, thousands of Harris County voters chose not to cast ballots because they felt there was no point or time.
The flood of people who flocked to the tax office’s second-floor voter registration area was recalled by Pamela Dora-Thomas, assistant director of voter registration and outreach. The office didn’t know how many people would arrive, so they extended their hours for the day to accommodate last-minute registrations.
We have occasionally (extended hours) in the past, Dora-Thomas stated. There might be some people around lunchtime and in the late evening, but there was a lot of traffic all day.
The county’s outreach team consists of five members, and one of their main responsibilities is to deputize people, or volunteer deputy voter registrars, to help with the voter registration application process.
More than 6,800 volunteer deputy voter registrars have been deputized by the county in the previous two years, including a record 1,091 this past August.
Laura Smith, the tax office’s director of communications, stated that the office’s mission extends beyond deputizing volunteers to include educating the public about the nuances of voter registration.
According to Smith, your representation changes if you relocate inside the county, for example, from the southwest to the north side. I suppose people aren’t always aware of that. People have a lot to learn.
Voter registration is handled by a number of neighborhood organizations in addition to the county tax office. To attract new voters, the League of Women Voters of Houston, for instance, frequently goes to high schools, colleges, haunted homes, and naturalization ceremonies, according to Executive Director Katie Campbell Shumway.
According to her, we made an effort to show up where people were in their daily lives. We visited neighborhood libraries as well as college campuses, of course. We visited eateries and breweries.
State and federal laws
States must set their voter registration deadlines no more than 30 days prior to each election, according a federal law from 1993.
According to J. Bryan Cole, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, the majority of states that currently allow election day registration did so because they felt that as many eligible individuals as feasible should cast ballots. However, in other states, and especially in the South, where voter participation is not considered a priority, people do not truly have the same priority or regard it with the same degree of importance.
Texas provides limited online voter registration for anyone who want to update, replace, or renew their driver’s license contact information.
If not, prospective voters will need to complete a registration form, sign it in pen, mail it, or deliver it in person to the county. The registrar will handle distributing the application if a volunteer deputy voter registrar is helping.
EARLIER: See where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump received the most votes in Harris County by using our map.
According to Becker, she would want to see Texas amend its legislation to permit voter registration until Election Day. Advocacy organizations are working to alter Texas’ voter registration laws.
According to Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit organization that supports online voter registration, election day registration, automatic registration, and pre-registration for 17-year-olds, a significant portion of voter suppression in Texas occurs before anyone ever gets to the voting booth because our voter registration systems are so outdated and awful.
According to French, she has had to inform someone every year since 2018 that they are not eligible to vote in the next election as they registered after the 30-day window.
According to French, the 30-day limit only makes sense because it gives counties time to physically type in all of the voter registrations and enter the data. By using paper voter registration rather than internet voter registration, we committed it to ourselves.
The Texas Legislature’s attempts to introduce online voter registration have not yet been successful. Rep. Ron Reynolds, a Democrat from Missouri City, introduced a bill in 2021 that would have allowed residents with valid driver’s licenses or other identification cards to apply online, but it was never approved by committee.
According to French, “I’m not sure if anything will change, but I also know that trying to predict the Texas Legislature is like trying to hold water in your hands.” But regardless of political affiliation, I hope that this session will introduce online voter registration for all Texans.
Once a person registers to vote, the challenge continues. According to Shumway, bringing people to the polls is the League of Women Voters of Houston’s next challenge.
According to her, there is a strong drive to register as many individuals as possible before the deadline because it is crucial. After that deadline, there is much less effort to give those who are registered the information and confidence they need to go and cast their ballots.
Less than 1.1 million Harris County voters did not cast ballots this year. This amounts to the lowest county turnout in the past 20 years, at 59 percent. Several registered voters told the Houston Landing that they didn’t have the time or want to vote.
According to Cole, a lot of what counts is that voters must be motivated to cast a ballot in the first place. Therefore, even if you make it extremely simple to register to vote and to cast a ballot, it won’t have the desired effect if people aren’t interested in voting in the first place.
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