AUSTIN, Texas — County election administrators and their state counterparts are celebrating how they reduced last winter’s towering rejection rate for mail ballots by 78% in last month’s midterm election.
Tamping down confusion caused by new requirements in a GOP-backed “election security” law passed in 2021, the state and county officials launched public education campaigns and redesigned mail-in ballot kits. They say those and other measures helped to improve compliance after a harrowing shakedown cruise in the March 1 primary.
With many voters confused as to which ID number they used while registering to vote many years earlier, and new demands that they write those numbers down on applications and flaps of envelopes transmitting their actual mail ballots, almost 25,000 – or 12.4% of all attempts in the primary to vote by mail – were rejected.
But in the Nov. 8 election, fewer than 9,350 mail ballots – or 2.7% of the total attempts – were tossed.
“As voters experience it more, they get used to the requirement” that they place their driver license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on the documents, said Sam Taylor, spokesman for outgoing Texas Secretary of State John Scott of Fort Worth.
“Those initial rejection rates, we thought they were going to go down,” Taylor said. “But back down to 2.7% is a vast, vast improvement from 12.4%.”
Of the state’s 15 most populous counties, Collin had the second lowest mail-ballot rejection rate (0.93%). Denton and Dallas counties posted the 5th and 6th lowest – 1.66% and 1.76%, respectively.
Some smaller North Texas counties fared even better: Johnson had no rejections. Parker and Rockwall came in well under the statewide average – at 1.18% and 1.58%, respectively.
Still, despite the improvement, rejections last month occurred at a rate just more than 1 percentage point higher than the statewide average (1.62%) in the three prior midterm elections – 2010, 201 and 2018.
‘Higher than it was’
Some election experts question whether the sacrifice of some Texans’ participation is justified by claims of the new law’s authors that vote fraud would be deterred through the new ID requirements.
“Even though the number [of rejections] dropped as people became more familiar with the application and return process, it’s still higher than it was beforehand,” said Remi Garza, the elections administrator for Cameron County and immediate past president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
“There’s going to be a question as to whether the benefit of adding this additional requirement outweighs the stated goal of reducing fraud in the vote-by-mail system,” he said.
It will be up to local prosecutors to scrutinize applications and return carrier envelopes and decide “if there was any fraud that they felt they needed to pursue or prosecute,” Garza said.
When some people are left off because of technical issues and their voices silenced, it’s something that we need to work on,” he said. “There’s not any indication at this point that the ballots that were ultimately rejected were because of some sort of fraud being detected, but rather just simply (voters) not being able to meet the new technical requirements that the state’s placed on them this past year.”
Taylor, the secretary of state’s office spokesman, attributed the large decrease in rejections to several efforts the office launched after the March 1 primary. The push included a bilingual voter education campaign, an educational video series on voting by mail, an updated design of the return carrier envelopes to highlight the ID field in red and state-approved inserts for counties to place into mail-in ballot kits to remind voters of the ID rule.
In March, counties reported many of the nearly 12,000 voters whose applications were rejected and the almost 25,000 voters whose mail ballots were rejected forgot to include one of the ID numbers or couldn’t remember which ID they’d used when registering to vote – and guessed wrong, triggering rejection.
In October, an analysis of those rejections by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice found Hispanic, Asian American and Black voters were significantly more likely to have both applications and ballots rejected under the new requirement.
Texas has one of the nation’s strictest laws on mail voting. It’s one of 15 states that requires an excuse to vote by mail. Leaders have resisted emulating moves by other states to make it easier to vote by mail, such as applying for a mail ballot online or sending all voters a mail ballot.
Local efforts
In the state’s initial report on the November midterm election, compiled on Dec. 14, all of the 10 counties around Dallas-Fort Worth showed mail-ballot rejection rates well below those in a few counties with eye-popping numbers, such as 12.17% in El Paso and 25.91% in Starr.
Atop the local list initially was Ellis, at 4.29%, followed by Kaufman, at 3.91%. However, Ellis County Elections Administrator Jana Onyon said the secretary of state’s report had not reflected her county’s official reconciliation report, which showed a rejection rate of only about 2%.
“Unfortunately the state report is not showing our final tallies,” Onyon said in an email. The biggest reasons mail ballots were rejected in Ellis County last month were missing ID numbers, missing signatures and late submissions, she said.
Taylor, Scott’s spokesman, responded, “Ellis and Kaufman have still not completely reconciled their voting history data in the statewide database – so we don’t have any new figures to provide at this time.” The state waited 30 days after the Nov. 8 election to create its report, he noted. Final reconciliation reports the two North Texas counties have posted on their websites show rejection rates of 2% in Ellis and 4.4% in Kaufman.
Kaufman County Elections Administrator Tandi Smith did not respond as of Thursday afternoon to a request for comment.
Rejection rates were 2.5% in Tarrant, and 2.35% in Hunt.
Collin County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbet attributed his county’s low mail-ballot rejection rate last month not just to state-led changes, such as highlighted areas on envelopes and bright-colored insert reminders, but also to intense media coverage and a push by his staff and the local Ballot Board to cure problems after initial rejections.
“We created scripts that were uniform in explaining methods for resolving the defective applications/ballots,” he recalled. Board members and election office staff “teamed up to do anything possible (email, phone calls and mail) to quickly reach voters” who were having problems, he said.
In special elections to fill local vacancies in Frisco and McKinney in January, the rejection rate was a “very concerning” 25%, he said. The new election law, passed in early September 2021, didn’t take effect until Dec. 2, 2021, forcing officials to sprint to educate themselves and voters before the March 2022 primary, he recalled. Other complications included new political boundaries after the once-a-decade redistricting process and supply chain “challenges” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Sherbet, a former Dallas County elections administrator.
“The proactive measures we took helped tremendously in reducing the number of rejections,” he said.
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