AUSTIN, Texas — Texas began early voting Monday in 2022′s first primary following a rushed rollout of tougher restrictions and the return of hundreds of mail ballots, dealing Republicans a clumsy debut of voting rules they tightened across the U.S. over the past year in the name of election security.
“Monday is going to be a big day for all of us to see how this plays out,” said Isabel Longoria, the elections administrator for Harris County, which includes Houston and more than 2 million voters.
“I think for all of us there is just a sense of uncertainty,” she said.
Election officials in Republican-leaning counties have also expressed frustration — and confusion — over changes they say they have scrambled to implement since Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in September signed a sweeping law that he said would make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.” For hundreds of Texas voters whose mail ballots and ballot applications have been rejected in recent weeks, that is not the case.
Harris County election officials announced just days before the first votes were cast in person that 40% of mail ballots received so far had already been sent back, mostly because they did not include required identification and signatures now mandated under Texas law.
Texas is among at least 18 states that will hold elections this year with heightened restrictions — an outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s repeated false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans have rejected Democrats’ protests that the changes would disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities.
But Texas had far less time than any other state to complete the work of changing how elections are run because of its especially early primary March 1 — two months before the next states, Indiana and Ohio, go to the polls in May.
How smoothly Texas’ primary goes in the coming weeks will be as closely watched as the actual races, few of which are high-profile. For Republicans, Abbott is heavily favored over a crop of far right challengers in his campaign for a third term, but Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting a tougher primary under the cloud of an FBI investigation.
