A group of the country’s leading conservatives wrote a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this month, applauding the Republican for making “election reform an emergency item.”
At the same time, however, the writers cautioned the governor that two omnibus election reform bills moving through the Texas Legislature lack voter verification requirements for mail-in ballots and “that would leave Texas open to massive fraud."
“This is particularly concerning,” the group of 96, writing under the Conservative Action Project, wrote, “considering usage of mail-ballots in your state has increased fivefold since 2012, to nearly 10% of all ballots cast in 2020. If that growth continues, and if that loophole remains, all the election reforms passed by the Legislature this year will be for naught.”
The public, they noted, is on the side of reform.
“A recent poll, conducted by WPA Intelligence for the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), shows that four out of five Texans believe voting in person and by mail should have the same voter identification requirements,” they wrote. “Securing that reform will go a long way toward minimizing the threat of fraud—and toward restoring Texans’ confidence in future elections.”
The same polling sample found that 60% of Texans "believe vote-by-mail should be available only to citizens who are elderly, disabled, away from their primary residence for work, or serving in the military." Only 27% think that vote-by-mail should be available to anyone regardless of their ability to vote in person.
The Texas Senate approved one of the voter reforms bills, SB 7, in early April. The other, HB 6, awaits further action in the House
Current Texas voting law restricts mail-in voting to those 65 and older, to voters who claim a disability, and those who will be out of their home county during the election, or are in jail and otherwise eligible to vote. Texas law currently requires voters to show a valid government-issued ID to vote in person, but only a signature and no identification to vote by mail.
Chuck DeVore, the TPPF vice president and national initiatives policy director, wrote, "The lack of a clear definition of a disability, combined with local partisan officials and campaigns and political get-out-the-vote organizations that encouraged the use of disability as a reason for an otherwise non-disabled voter to vote from home, contributed to a quintupling of mail-in ballot use over the last two general presidential election cycles, from 204,000 in 2012, to 434,000 in 2016, to about 1 million in 2020.”
One of the conclusions of a 2005 bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and James Baker III, secretary of state under President George H.W Bush, was that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” The commission also found that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
Signers of the 16-year-old letter included Edwin Meese III, attorney general under former President Ronald Reagan, Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton, and L. Brent Bozwell III, founder and president of Media Research Center.
According to a March report from the TPPF, “the problem of election fraud is mainly the domain of mail-in voting, where a lack of identification safeguards and inconsistent voter list maintenance can be exploited to produce illegal ballots.”
