The proposed constitutional amendment would affirm that voters must be citizens, a requirement that’s already in state law.

Senate Bill 985 would revise a 2023 law that raised the minimum number of voting locations. County election officials say they’ve struggled to comply with it.

A Votebeat analysis shows how such requirements risk disenfranchising key voter groups, including Native Americans and college students.

Voting went well in the presidential election, but Trudy Hancock and her staff are still fielding questions. And the answers don’t seem to matter.

A mostly quiet Election Day in Texas came after a series of pitched partisan battles over how elections should be conducted.

Conservative groups and individual activists have targeted tens of thousands of Texans over their eligibility. But state and federal protections are in place.

In limited instances, the choices some Texas voters make can later be identified using public, legally available data.

Brazos County election officials are responding to demands from skeptical residents by expanding hand counts and ordering special paper.

The Republican-passed Senate Bill 1 added restrictions to voting in Texas that plaintiffs say disproportionately affect voters of color

Karen Wiseman previously sued former election administrator Heider Garcia and participated in a right-wing group’s search for 2020 voter fraud. She’s one of the three finalists, none of whom have experience running elections.

Lawmakers lowered the penalty to a misdemeanor in 2021, but then almost immediately began discussing raising it back.

Her nonpartisan reporting will focus on voting access and the nuts and bolts of how elections are run, including early and mail-in voting, voter registration and election security.

Democratic voters in Texas were more likely to cast their ballots by mail than Republican voters in the last election. In Cameron County, home to Brownsville, 11% of Biden votes were mailed in, compared with only 6% of Trump votes. In 2016, mail-in votes accounted for 7% of Trump votes while only 5% of Clinton votes were mailed in. The county nearly doubled its mail-in vote count between the two elections, from 42,697 in 2016 to 77,588 in 2020. In Harris County, just over 12% of Biden votes were mailed in, while mail-in votes accounted for 9% of Trump votes.

The Texas Legislature is expected to go through the redistricting process during the 2021 legislative session. After that, state and local governments use the new population data to draw new congressional and state legislative maps. So Texas’ legislative districts change every 10 years, but the total number of lawmakers doesn’t. They’ll also work alongside expert mapmakers and the Texas Legislative Council and receive input from the public. Allison Riggs, who argued the Texas redistricting case in the U.S. Supreme Court, said the absence of federal preclearance is deeply concerning.

Gwendolyn McMillan Lawe, 72, had to go to three polling locations in Dallas to cast a ballot in the November election. Credit: Courtesy of Gwendolyn McMillan Lawe(Audio unavailable. Editor’s note: This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. For Gwendolyn McMillan Lawe, voting in the 2020 general election involved a lot of waiting and trips to a trio of Dallas-area polling sites. The pandemic, absentee ballot problems, technical issues and registration problems are among a list of hurdles that impacted Texans.

Editor’s note: This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. He was thrilled by Texas’ lengthy early voting period — which had been expanded from two weeks to three weeks because of the pandemic. Most of them are aimed at increasing voter access, which lawmakers said became a more urgent issue during the pandemic. The idea that high turnout only helps Democrats is one of the biggest hills to climb for changes like online voter registration — but that may change after this year, said Grayson, who advocates for automatic voter registration programs for one of his firm’s clients. Most legislation expanding access has been filed by Democrats, while GOP legislation focuses largely on stemming fraud.

When the Lone Star State defied polls and stayed solidly red on election night, dejected Texas Democrats saw the next 10 years flash before their eyes. Up for review this legislative session are 150 Texas House districts, 31 Texas Senate districts, and likely 38 or 39 U.S. House districts. Texas Republican Party Chair Allen West is already pushing for Republicans in charge to refrain from compromising with Democrats altogether. State Senate districts will have to assemble some 950,000 people per district, and state House districts will have nearly 200,000. Lasting impactsRedistricting was the tipping point in the 2002 Republican takeover of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years.

Many voted in this years Texas election. Both sides agree that some Texas voters were disenfranchised, though they disagree over why. It took several minutes of convincing before the poll workers would let her submit a provisional ballot. Everyone needs to go to the polls, go vote — vote, vote, vote, vote, vote — and then I go, and I get treated like that.”The murky world of provisional ballotsProvisional ballots like the one Booth was forced to cast hover in an electoral netherworld. When a provisional vote is accepted, it usually signals that the problem was not the voter’s fault.

Voters stand in line at the American Airlines Center to cast their ballots on Election Day in Dallas. Joanne Brodsky, center, chats in her garage-turned-polling location on Tuesday during Election Day in Houston. Fort Bend elections manager John Oldham said Election Day voting was lower than usual. Voters wait in line to cast their ballots at Dan Ruiz Branch Library in Austin on Election Day. Last: Voters stand in line at the Oak Lawn Branch Library to cast their ballots on Election Day in Dallas.

And sometimes — as was the case for Texans Meredith Reilly and Zachary Houdek — you have to go 3,000 extra miles. Underpinning recent stories of voters’ determination are vexing obstacles like missing absentee ballots, a complicated registration system and other issues brought into focus by an influx of early and absentee voters. Absentee voters in the U.S. who haven’t received their ballot in the mail yet can still show up in person to be counted. “It should be streamlined, easy and simple to vote,” said Dallas attorney Ladd Hirsch, whose daughter flew home to vote after her absentee ballot didn’t reach her. “Only because our family is so committed to voting that my daughter actually got to vote,” Kar said.

Like clockwork, the 65-year-old requests his mail-in, or absentee ballot, every February, and his November ballot arrives in September. “But that’s how it works.”What do you do if you haven’t received your mail-in ballot? But she had neither asked for nor received a mail-in ballot, she told the worker. As Republican state leaders waged a war on the expansion of mail-in voting, Lynn worried that her ballot could be invalidated. She surrendered her mail-in ballot at an in-person polling site and voted on a machine instead.