Excessive Mandates Have No Place in Texas Elections

For generations, Texas voters have cast their ballots with confidence, knowing that they are participating in secure elections. Despite these rigorous safeguards and strong voter confidence in Texas elections, several bills moving in the Texas Legislature would impose excessive mandates and more red tape on Texas citizens to vote.

Texas already has a strong system of checks and balances to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote and have their votes counted. In addition, federal law requires Americans to confirm their citizenship when they register to vote.

Today, when a Texan registers to vote for the first time, they must prove their identity and eligibility by providing a Social Security number or an official state ID, like a driver’s license. This allows bipartisan teams of local election officials to confirm the voter’s citizenship status and routinely check and cross-check each voter’s eligibility. Breaking these laws is not only a federal offense but also a second-degree felony under Texas law.

Despite these effective safeguards, several bills in the Texas Legislature, including Senate Bill 16 and House Bill 5337, would create a bureaucratic requirement that voters present a current passport or a certified birth certificate when registering. Similarly, any existing voter who cannot confirm that they have previously provided state officials with this kind of documentation would need to do so to be able to vote in all elections.

This type of mandate on Texas voters would likely block tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from casting a ballot. One recent analysis of U.S. State Department data estimates that 12.3 million citizens living in Texas do not have a current passport.

An estimated 5.6 million women living in Texas couldn’t use their birth certificates to prove their citizenship to vote because they changed their names when they got married.

Imagine showing up to vote on Election Day, only to be prohibited from voting altogether or being told that you cannot vote in elections for president or governor because your registration was changed or canceled. This is not a far-fetched scenario — it is bound to happen because of the problems with enforcing such laws. It nearly happened in 2019 when election workers in Texas erroneously flagged tens of thousands of eligible citizens for removal from the voting rolls due to their names potentially “matching” suspected noncitizens based on outdated and incomplete records.

When Kansas had a similar law to the one being proposed in Texas, one in eight citizen registrants was blocked from voting for over three years. This led to a federal court ruling that the Kansas law was an impermissible violation of the Constitution and current federal law. Republican election officials in Kansas now say lawmakers shouldn’t follow the same path. Just in the last few months, a federal appeals court struck down some of the restrictions Texas lawmakers are now considering imposing on Texas citizens.

The costs, chaos, and consequences of these extreme efforts to saddle voters with documentary proof of citizenship are far-reaching. As Texas lawmakers ponder these ill-advised changes to voting requirements, the U.S. House has passed the SAVE Act and President Trump issued an executive order in March that seeks to impose similar mandates.

Requiring documentary proof of citizenship to vote is based on the highly dubious – and repeatedly disproven – narrative that undocumented immigrants are voting in droves in our elections. In Texas, strict laws that help ensure only citizens vote are already in place.

Instead of pushing policies that just create more red tape for U.S. citizens to vote based on disinformation, we should be holding firm to our system of checks and balances that already ensure free, fair, and secure elections.

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Secure Democracy Foundation is a nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization building stronger elections, state by state.