Waiting Six Hours to Vote in Texas Is a Bad Omen for November

By Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair

05 March 20

“It is an outrage that it is this hard to cast a vote in this country,” MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said during Super Tuesday coverage.

n 2013, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to make changes to voting laws without approval from the federal government. The Shelby v. Holder decision was a major blow to ballot access, and, according to a 2019 report, “paved the way for systematic statewide efforts to reduce the number of polling places” in states like Texas, which has cut some 750 of its voting sites since. Such reductions resulted in egregiously long lines to vote in both 2016 and in the 2018 midterms. Not coincidentally, these waits have seemed to disproportionately impact minority voters.

Super Tuesday was a lot of things—a battle for the direction of the Democratic party; a demonstration of the limits of money in politics; a stunning comeback for Joe Biden—but it was also a preview of the obstacles many Americans may face in casting ballots in the general election this November. While political pundits tracked the horse race between Biden and Bernie Sanders, voters in Texas endured punishingly long wait times at the polls, some still waiting to cast their ballots hours after the polls were supposed to close. “It just kept going and going all around the building,” Houston hospital worker Mackenzie Maupin told the Texas Tribune of the crowd at her polling place. She had attempted to cast her vote earlier in the day, but had to go to work; when she showed up to cast her ballot for Sanders after her shift, she said, the wait was still long. “I’ve never seen lines like this,” she said. One Houston man, Hervis Rogers, finally voted after six hours.

Polling locations in diverse districts like Dallas, Houston, and college campuses were characterized by two to three hour waits. At a site on the campus of Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston, voters reported waiting more than five hours to cast ballots, thanks to long lines, understaffing, and troubles with voting machines. “We all stayed and we motivated each other because we really wanted to get our vote across,” one voter told MSNBC. “And we really felt like they must be doing this on purpose to steer people or discourage people to come vote.”

“It is an outrage that it is this hard to cast a vote in this country,” MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said Tuesday night. “Over the past ten years, the Republican-led government in Texas has made it harder and harder and harder to vote—not only in terms of the kind of documentation you have to show when you get there, but also they have been closing precincts, they have been closing voting places systematically, particularly in places that have high minority, young people, and poor people turnout. So some of this is deliberate.”

Some of the issues may have stemmed from large voter turnout in the slate of primaries Tuesday, including in Texas, where Biden edged out Sanders. But the state may have been better equipped to handle the influx of Americans participating in democracy had conservatives not vandalized the infrastructure meant to ensure access to the ballot.

That has already had devastating effects on enfranchisement. As the Appeal’s Kira Lerner reported Tuesday, the extensive wait times in minority communities in the Lone Star state likely kept black and Latino voters from casting ballots. That’s disturbing enough on its own. Combined with other voter suppression efforts—a senior adviser to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign was caught on a hot mic last year appearing to discuss a more “aggressive” voter suppression effort this cycle—the limited access to polling locations, particularly in high-stakes states like Texas, could play a major role in November’s election.