The Texas Legislature recently sent Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, legislation that will require those registering to vote to use their home addresses.
Senate Bill 1111 targets what some see as a growing problem of voters using post office boxes or commercial addresses to register to vote in elections they are legally barred from voting.
“There are ongoing concerns over recent reports of voters allegedly moving their voter registrations to another district, county, or state to vote in a special election, only to change their voter registration back to their previous address after the election is over,” a Texas House committee analysis of the bill said. “In order to combat this type of voter fraud, there have been calls to establish clearer standards for the determination and verification of a voter's residence address.”
The legislation is part of a larger effort in the Texas Legislature to combat an increase in perceived voter fraud, especially with the explosion of the use of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Numerous recounts and court cases turned up no evidence of massive voter fraud during the 2020 elections, Reuters reports.
“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,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation wrote in a March report.
The number of mail-in ballots in Texas in 2020, more than 1 million, doubled the number from 2018 and quadrupled it from 2012.
In addition, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton prosecuted some cases of voter fraud, including cases where voters supplied false information on ballots, the Houston Republic previously reported.
“Many continue to claim that there’s no such thing as election fraud,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the arrest of a Texas woman on charges of election fraud. “We’ve always known that such a claim is false and misleading, and today we have additional hard evidence.”
Finally, the Public Interest Legal Foundation found that a handful of states, Texas among them, account for roughly 51% of deceased registrants.
