And Here Comes Texas Pulling Up the Rear
There are 37 states with online voter registration. Texas, of course, is not one of them.
Voter registration cards in Texas arrive looking like a bushel basket of wire coat hangers because most voter registration happen in the summer and people sweat all over the cards. You mostly can’t read the handwriting on them and it takes a magician, a priest, and a Magic 8 Ball to decipher them.
But our legislature doesn’t want to change. Change hurts. It’s not good.
Ever since I can remember, our buddy Glen Maxey has gone to the legislature to lobby for online voting. Hell, even our secretary of state supports it and he’s appointed by the Governor. Every year, the County Clerk in Harris County (think Houston) rejects it because he can’t send an email without a teenager sitting beside him holding his hand and four phone calls to Bill Gates. So, we don’t get online voter registration.
However, there is hope. Texas allows people to renew their licenses online, but doesn’t allow them to register to vote at the same time. Last week, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia told the state to fix that.
I am certain that our state attorney general will appeal it because he spends more money needlessly than Scott Pruitt.
But it’s a glimmer of hope to pull people screaming into these new-fangled fads.
If you want to make sure that election results tampering is common and undetectable, institute online voting.
Remember : it’s Republicans in charge of the machines and the software. Would they cheat merely to retain political power? Does the Pope shit in the woods ?
1Whatever happened to Motor Voter?
2In other election news, Virginia election officials assigned 26 voters to the wrong district in Newport News last year. If they’d done it right, almost certainly the Virginia House of Delegates would be split 50-50, instead of being controlled by the GOP 51-49.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/voters-assigned-to-wrong-districts-may-have-cost-democrats-in-pivotal-virginia-race/2018/05/13/09a9dd8a-5465-11e8-a551-5b648abe29ef_story.html
3Heck, our state AG will probably try to change on-line vehicle renewals back to the mail in paper system in order to block on line voter registration.
4I think part of the problem with this in Texas is that the other state services, like driver licence and vehicle registration, that have been been (partially) implemented/transferred with an online application process have all been contracted out to various software vendors (you never heard of before). These are in all likelihood ‘insider’ sweetheart deals too, most having been started under Guv pRick Perry.
5I’ve been doing driver, vehicle, and boat renewals online for quite some time. Whether starting from the DPS or TPWD websites, the actual renewal and payment processes are redirected to some third-party vendor (for a nominal fee of course). Probably quite profitable for the principals and their buddies in the Lege when millions of people do this.
I suspect that there may be some legal impediments to allowing voter registration and actual voting functions from being subcontracted out to some non-state vendor (with ‘connections’ of course).
So since making state-run online voting and reg a state-only function would involve adding whole departments and personnel to state government, thereby costing a little taxpayer money, it just ain’t gonna happen as long as the Rethugs are in total control.
Online voter registration may be ok but, take it from an old retired IT guy that reads the Risks Digest, online voting is a really bad idea.
6JJ, you hit the head upon the nail. There are still so many people who are freaking terrified of anything that smacks of computer. They really do not enjoy the 20th or 21st centuries. Not one bit. What really bites them is that all things digital really do mean that they are now technological hostages to their smarty-pants grand-kids. Plus they just don’t trust the digital age. Remember how scared people once were of the telephone? That it sent lightening through the wires and electrocuted you? Well, same damn deal. However, no that a judge has told somebody to grow the hell up or zip yourself up in a cave, maybe, just maybe there is hope for more of us.
7A good time to say thank you to Alison Lundergan
8Grimes, Secretary of State for Kentucky. The state voter site is as good as any government site I’ve used, and much better than my health insurance’s website. I can apply for my absentee ballot on-line (I live in China). When the official ballot is ready, I get it by email, along with forms to print the envelopes. My wife and I vote and give it to someone traveling to the US. They drop it in a mailbox (free postage if mailed in the US). If I had to wait for the state to mail me a ballot, I don’t think I would ever get one on time.