Election officials in North Texas ultimately saw ballot application rejections return to normal levels, but mail ballots are being sent back to voters at abnormally high rates and turnout remains low.
AUSTIN — With the primary coming on Tuesday, North Texas elections administrators are seeing a mixed bag of results regarding mail-in ballot voting as they conduct the state’s first statewide vote under a controversial election law.
Even as turnout has remained typically low for a primary in a non-presidential year, this year’s primary has been mired in complications caused by new voter ID provisions under Senate Bill 1.
The spotlight on local election offices likely never has been so bright as Democrats continue to decry high rejection rates of ballot applications and mailed ballots as proof of voter suppression brought by SB 1.
Election workers have been walking on eggshells under the new law, which made it a felony for any election worker to solicit a mail-in ballot from a prospective voter. That part of the law has been sidelined after a San Antonio federal court granted an injunction earlier this month.
After large amounts of mail-in ballots were initially rejected for failing to meet new voter ID requirements under SB 1, the rejection rates are now approaching normal levels in Dallas and Collin Counties, according to election officials.
But the amount of ballots that are being rejected remains abnormally high. Dallas County initially saw 28% of mailed ballots rejected because of errors. Through Saturday, 18% of absentee ballots have been rejected because the voter either submitted a ballot with an ID number not matching voter records or left the ID field blank, according to a spokesman for the county elections department.
In Collin County, 19% of ballots have been rejected, down from an initial rejection rate of about 25%, county Election Administrator Bruce Sherbet said.
“I expect that percentage to continue to drop as we head towards election day,” Sherbet said.
In Dallas County, Friday’s deadline for mail-in ballot applications passed with nearly 17,000 received.
Through Saturday, 12.9% have been rejected. It appears several hundred applications still need to be processed. However, that rejection rate is near the 13.5% rejection rate for absentee ballot requests that the office saw in 2018′s primary, Dallas County’s election department spokesman Nicholas Solorzano said in an email.
Sherbet said in an email Tuesday that his office’s rejection rate for absentee ballot requests has dropped to 3%. For his office, that is pretty typical.
Tarrant County did not respond to a request for similar data.
Absentee ballots must be postmarked by March 1 to be counted. But because the deadline to submit an application to vote by mail has passed, anyone who gets a rejection notice at this point will have to either vote in person or sit the election out altogether.
‘Very confusing’
For Cedar Hill resident Mike Flocken, not voting in the primary was a possibility. Flocken, who is over 65, and his wife, Cherryl, requested mail-in ballots for the first time.
“We’re both senior citizens, so we decided, you know, with the pandemic and everything else going on, we decided to give the mail-in ballot process a try,” Flocken said.
Flocken printed out applications from Dallas County’s website and submitted an application. About two weeks later, the couple both received a rejection notice. They both tried again. Mike got a rejection notice, but Cherryl received a rejection notice and a ballot.
“It was very confusing,” Cherryl Flocken said.
Mike Flocken submitted a third application and then was told his application was successful, but he also received a rejection notice. When he called to find out what was going on, the answers were somewhat elusive.
A worker in the office told him his ballot was in the mail, but it had been roughly three weeks. She suggested he write a letter asking for a new ballot.
“Basically I said to myself, ‘Well this is enough. I’m not going to go through all this. I’m not going to write a letter,’” Flocken said. “If they’re making it this difficult to participate in the democratic process. Then it’s just too frustrating to go and vote.”
A ballot did eventually show up in his mailbox, and Flocken said he had a change of heart about participating in the primary — his first time to vote in the Democratic primary.
“I guess, from that standpoint, you could say there was a happy ending or it ended successfully, but it certainly was frustrating with not a lot of information being exchanged for the rejections and what happened to the mail-in ballot the first time,” he said.
But watching it all unfold frustrated Cherryl Flocken enough that she said Tuesday she won’t vote by mail. She was unsure if she would vote at all in the primary.
Turnout has remained low so far in the primary. In Dallas County, 30,561 people and 17,359 residents had voted in the Democratic Primary through Monday, according to the secretary of state’s website.
As early voting resumed across Texas on Tuesday, about 2.7% of registered voters had cast ballots in the Republican primary compared with a 1.7% turnout in the Democratic primary. In total, 754,000 people had voted so far through Monday.
That turnout looks similar to 2018′s midterm primaries, according to Austin-based Republican election analyst Derek Ryan. If the trend continues, final voter turnout would be about 10% for Republicans and 7% for Democrats.
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