AUSTIN, Texas — County election administrators and their state counterparts are celebrating how they reduced last winter’s towering rejection rate for mail ballots by 78% in last month’s midterm election.
Tamping down confusion caused by new requirements in a GOP-backed “election security” law passed in 2021, the state and county officials launched public education campaigns and redesigned mail-in ballot kits. They say those and other measures helped to improve compliance after a harrowing shakedown cruise in the March 1 primary.
With many voters confused as to which ID number they used while registering to vote many years earlier, and new demands that they write those numbers down on applications and flaps of envelopes transmitting their actual mail ballots, almost 25,000 – or 12.4% of all attempts in the primary to vote by mail – were rejected.
