On election day last month, 29-year-old Shannah Becker from Pasadena showed up at a polling location to cast her ballot, but was turned away.
Although she had submitted her voter registration application in early October, she mailed it in late, one day past the Oct. 7 deadline.
“I definitely felt very disappointed,” Becker said. “And I asked if there was anything else I could do to be able to vote still and they just said, ‘Unfortunately not.’ I feel like a lot of people didn’t really realize the deadline until it was too close, or even past.”
Becker was among the 21,026 Harris County residents who registered after the deadline, making them ineligible to vote in the Nov. 5 presidential election. According to the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office, 3,701 of those registrations were recorded on Election Day.
Had they been able to cast ballots, those newly registered voters could have affected the results of 13 countywide races in which the winning margin was under 21,000 votes.
The impact to the countywide turnout rate, however, would not have been as large: overall Harris County turnout would have increased by less than a percentage point if all of those registrants had been able to vote.
Texas is one of 10 states that has a voter registration deadline of 30 days before an election. In 23 states, including California and Wyoming, residents can register and vote on the same day. Twenty of those states allow residents to register on Election Day.
County efforts
The county tax office, which is in charge of voter registration, works year-round to add to the voter rolls. On Oct. 7, the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 5 elections, the office received more than 5,500 registrations.
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Pamela Dora-Thomas, assistant director of voter registration and outreach at the tax office, recalled the influx of people that came to the department’s second-floor voter registration area. The office extended its hours for the day to accommodate last-minute registrants, but had no idea how many people would show up.
“We’ve (extended hours) in the past, and it's been sporadic,” Dora-Thomas said. “We'd have a little crowd closer to lunch and then late evening, but this was heavy traffic all day long.”
One of the primary duties of the county’s five-member outreach team is to deputize residents, known as volunteer deputy voter registrars, to assist in the voter registration application process.
Over the last two years, the county has deputized more than 6,800 volunteer deputy voter registrars, including a record 1,091 this past August.
In addition to deputizing volunteers, Laura Smith, director of communications at the tax office, said educating the public on the ins and outs of voter registration is another focus of the office.
“If you move within the county, say, you go from the southwest side to the north side, that changes who your representation is,” Smith said. “People don't always know that, right? There's a lot to teach people.”
In addition to the county tax office, other local organizations work to register voters. The League of Women Voters of Houston, for example, regularly attends naturalization ceremonies, high schools, colleges, even haunted houses, to reach new voters, Executive Director Katie Campbell Shumway said.
“We tried to show up where people are in their day-to-day lives,” she said. “Of course, we were at college campuses … but we were also at local libraries. We were at restaurants, breweries.”
State and federal laws
A 1993 federal law requires states to set their voter registration deadlines no more than 30 days before each election.
“Most of the states that have election day registration now, the impetus was that they believed that as many eligible people as possible should vote,” said J. Bryan Cole, political science professor at the University of Houston. “But then in other states, people don't really have that same priority, or they don't view it with the same level of importance, and particularly in the South where voter turnout is not seen as something that should be a priority.”
Texas offers limited online voter registration, for people renewing, replacing or updating contact information for their drivers licenses.
Otherwise, potential voters must fill out a registration form, sign it in ink, drop it in the mail or take it to the county in person. If being assisted by a volunteer deputy voter registrar, the registrar will take care of delivering the application.
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Becker said she would like to see Texas change the law to allow voters to register up to and including Election Day. There are efforts underway by advocacy organizations to change voter registration in Texas.
“A huge chunk of voter suppression in Texas happens before anybody ever reaches the ballot box because our voter registration systems are so out of date and terrible,” said Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit that supports online voter registration, election day registration, automatic registration and pre-registration for 17-year-olds.
French said each year since 2018, she has had to break the news to a person that they could not vote in the upcoming election because they registered past the 30-day deadline.
“The only reason that that 30-day deadline makes any sense is to give counties time to input the data and physically type in all the voter registrations,” French said. “We did that to ourselves by having paper voter registration instead of online voter registration.”
Efforts at the Texas Legislature to implement online voter registration have yet to meet with success. A 2021 bill by state Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City, to allow any resident with an unexpired driver’s license or other identification card to submit an application online never made it out of committee.
“I don't know if anything will change, but I also know that trying to predict the Texas Legislature is like trying to hold water in your hands,” French said. “But I hope that this session will bring online voter registration for every voter in Texas, regardless of what party they're in.”
The challenge doesn’t stop when someone registers to vote. Shumway said the next hurdle for the League of Women Voters of Houston is getting people to the polls.
“There is such a big push to get as many people registered as possible before the deadline, because that deadline is so, so important,” she said. “There’s a lot less activity after that deadline to help the people who are registered to have the confidence, the information, that they need to then go and cast their ballot.”
This year just under 1.1 million potential voters in Harris County skipped the polls. That represents a county turnout of 59 percent, the lowest in the last two decades. In interviews with the Houston Landing, several registered voters cited having no time or interest in casting a ballot.
“I think that a lot of what matters is that people have to have a desire to vote in the first place,” Cole said. “And so, even if you make it really easy to vote, really easy to get registered, that's not going to, you know, if people don't want to vote in the first place, then that's going to limit the effect that it could have.”
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