The Honest Elections Project filed a brief in the Texas Supreme Court supporting the Texas Attorney General’s request for the Court to order county officials to comply with state absentee ballot laws.
Texas law allows people with a genuine illness or disability to vote absentee. However, the Texas Democratic Party sued Travis County seeking to compel the county to treat susceptibility to COVID-19 as a “disability”—in essence, to rewrite state law and permit any person to claim to be disabled and request an absentee ballot. A lower court agreed, but while that case has been progressing, local officials in Harris, Dallas, and other counties have been actively encouraging voters to claim they are “disabled” to get around Texas’s election law.
“Voters deserve elections they can trust. Unfortunately, Texans are being let down by the very officials entrusted to administer the vote,“ said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. “Through their actions, these officials are creating confusion and uncertainty throughout the state about who may lawfully vote absentee, and are undermining the rule of law.”
The Texas Supreme Court granted the state’s request for a stay of the lower court’s order in the Texas Democrats’ case, and will consider the petition to order officials to comply with state election law on May 20.