Advocates and supporters are urging the conferees in the Legislature to insert the absentee ID provisions from now-dead Senate Bill 1509 into Senate Bill 7 before it is approved by the conference committee.
Texas SB 1509, which died in the House earlier this month, would have required a state driver's license or ID number to request an absentee ballot. SB 7, the largest election integrity bill, is currently in a conference committee to work out the differences between the House-passed and Senate-passed versions of the bill.
Texas law currently requires that voters show a valid government-issued ID to vote in person, but only requires a signature and no ID to vote by mail.
“It’s a good first step,” Chad Ennis, senior fellow, Election Protection Project for the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), told Houston Daily regarding election legislation currently before lawmakers. “We are hopeful additional measures will be added to the legislation before going to the governor [Greg Abbott].”
A recent poll conducted by WPI Intelligence found that 81% of Texans say voting in person and by mail should have the same voter identification requirements. The same polling sample found that 60% of respondents 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% believe that vote-by-mail should be available to anyone regardless of their ability to vote in person.
According to a March report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “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.”
Elections officials throughout the country have concluded that negligible election fraud occurred during the 2020 general election.
The conferees are Sens. Bryan Hughes, Paul Bettencourt, Dawn Buckingham, Lois Kolkhorst, and Beverly Powell and Reps. Briscoe Cain, Terry Canales, Travis Clardy, Nicole Collier and Jacey Jetton.
