Bruce Elfant Schools Ken Paxton on Voting Rights

When Ken Paxton sued Travis County to stop them from registering voters, he ran up against the greatest voter registration advocate in Texas.

Welcome to another installment of Life Its Ownself. I offer insight, analysis and context on Texas and national politics, as well as entertaining stories of life its ownself in the Lone Star State. If you like what you read, please 1) smash the Like button at the bottom of this post, 2) subscribe to this newsletter, and 3) tell your 1,000 best friends to read and subscribe. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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But first, your moment of Zen .. a West Texas thunderstorm at the Broken Wheel Bar in Marathon, Sunday, September 22.

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Sunday, September 22, 2024

         Bruce Elfant is the Tax Assessor-Collector of Travis County, a position he has held since January 2013. Before that, he was a Constable for 20 years. He is what they call “unassuming,” even “self-effacing,” two virtues in very short supply among politicians in these times. He’s also an anachronism: a politician who serves in office for all the right reasons.

Bruce Elfant with your Humble Correspondent and a moose (?).

         As Tax Assessor-Collector, he has many duties – collecting property taxes, registering motor vehicles, taking payments for beer, wine and liquor licenses, and collecting court fees and fines for the county’s courts. He and his office do all these things well.

         But there’s one part of his job that Bruce especially loves, that gets him out of bed on Saturday mornings and keeps him sitting at tables outside community centers on cold winter evenings. Bruce is the county’s official Voter Registrar, and registering people to vote has been his passion as long as he can remember.

         Bruce believes that being able to choose our leaders is the fundamental right in our democracy. Without that right, all our freedoms and responsibilities are contingent. Bruce has experimented with making it easier to fill out an application and mail or deliver it. He took an obscure provision allowing citizens to become “volunteer deputy registrars” and created a multitude of voter registration drives in campuses and office buildings and bowling alleys throughout the county.

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         Nothing about this is heroic, except that Bruce lives and works in Texas, a state perennially hostile to making it easy for people to register and vote. Take online voter registration, for example: when Bruce started lobbying to permit it in Texas, only six states allowed their citizens to do it; now only six states don’t.

         Every time the Legislature meets, Bruce recruits a House member or senator to file legislation permitting online voter registration. Then he patiently works the relevant House and Senate committees, first begging their chairs to even hear the bill, then testifying and lobbying the members to vote for the measure. He’s been unsuccessful for over a decade.

         And there’s a reason: the leaders of Texas don’t want it to be easier to register, or to cast a ballot. It’s nothing but exclusionary politics, of course, justified by farcical stories about non-citizens and other “undesirables” diluting the voting strength of Texas’s aging Anglo minority.

         Last week saw the latest skirmish in this war. The Travis County Commissioners Court voted to hire an outside contractor to send voter registration cards to eligible, but not registered, voters, inviting them to register before the October 7^th deadline.

         Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who never met a voter suppression tactic he did not like, sued Travis County to kill the outreach program. And last Tuesday, Travis County sued back, this time in federal court, arguing Paxton’s lawsuits were an effort to suppress the voting rights of Travis County residents.

         In a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Elfant schooled Ken Paxton on voting rights in Texas, listing for him the ways in which he and his Republican colleagues had made voting harder, not easier, over the years.

         I am reprinting Elfant’s statement as a masterclass in how voting rights are under threat every day in the Lone Star State.

Tax Assessor & Voter Registrar, Bruce Elfant                             

Travis County Lawsuit Statement                                           

September 17, 2024

Travis County has long had a robust voter registration outreach program that includes several thousand volunteer deputy registrars, hundreds of governmental and private sector partners, Text to Register, unregistered voter maps, door to door, deadline activities, and yes, mailings to eligible but not registered voters.

This is nothing new, but apparently this is new to the attorney general who is trying to stop me from doing the job that state law says I should be doing.

According to the Elections Performance Index, Texas ranks 29^th among states in voter registration and 34^th in voter turnout. With such dismal participation in our democratic process, one wonders why our state leaders aren’t sounding the alarm.

But instead of working to increase participation in our elections, our state leaders are focused on telling election officials what we can’t do.

We can’t join the 23 states and DC that allow same day voter registration. Or the 25 states that have implemented automatic voter registration. Or the 44 states and Guam that allow their citizens to register to vote online.

And when it comes to keeping voter rolls accurate, Texas election officials can no longer rely on the multi-state partnership to identify those who have moved to or from other states, felons, duplicate records, patterns of possible voter fraud, or eligible but not registered citizens who have moved to Texas. (Ed. Note: Texas withdrew from the partnership last year.)

So, now the Texas attorney general is telling election officials through his lawsuits that we can’t even reach out to eligible but unregistered voters, in accordance with state and federal law.

In his lawsuit, the attorney general expresses concern that a bunch of non-citizens will register to vote as a result of our sending voter registration applications to eligible but unregistered citizens.  Even if non-citizens were to engage in a conspiracy to intercept voter registration applications from the mailboxes of eligible citizens, the Texas Secretary of State checks every application against DPS, social security and other databases.

With Texas’ antiquated largely paper-based voter registration system, incomplete, unreadable or lost applications pose a far higher risk than non-citizens successfully being able to register to vote. 

Travis County assiduously follows state and federal election law and are proud that our voter registration strategies consistently result in our having among the highest voter registration rates in Texas. 

Instead of telling election officials what we can’t do, I look forward to a day when our state leaders will actually be committed to making Texas a voter registration and turnout leader among states.

Finally, I want to thank our County Judge and Commissioners Court and our amazing County Attorney team for your roles in standing up to this unwarranted and unlawful attempt to suppress our efforts to register voters

Happy National Voter Registration Day!

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         Paxton’s lawsuits – he filed a similar lawsuit against Bexar County (it got tossed) and threatened legal action against Harris County, which then declined to enter into a similar contract – are part of a larger strategy by his office and other GOP officials to suppress voters, particularly minorities and the young, this fall.

         For example, last week the Tarrant County Commissioners Court turned away an effort by GOP County Judge Tim O’Hare to close polling locations at college campuses. O’Hare’s argument: no one voted there anyway, and operating the voting sites was expensive. Two of O’Hare’s Republican colleagues on the court voted against his proposal, dooming it. In response, the Tarrant County GOP said the quiet part out loud, castigating the apostate commissioners for their votes because they “undermine the ability of Republicans to win the general election in Tarrant County” and jeopardize “the party's ability to maintain robust, conservative leadership in local government.”

         Local leaders and the courts will probably keep Ken Paxton at bay for now, but watch for bad bills in the next legislative session in January. Meanwhile, there’s one thing you have 100% control over: whether YOU’RE registered to vote. If you’re in Texas, you can check your registration here. If you’re not registered, there are many options to register, so long as you act before October 7^th.  

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         As a public service to my readers during this election season, here is a calendar of major election dates in Texas. (h/t Lone Star Left’s Newsletter)

• October 7: Last day to register to vote.

• October 21: First day to early vote.

• October 25: Last day to apply for a mail-in ballot.

• November 1: Last day to early vote.

• November 5: Election day!