Super Tuesday news coverage in local media outlets of the hourslong waits Democratic primary voters faced in Texas left out Republicans’ ongoing efforts to restrict voting, such as unnecessary voter ID laws and closure of polling sites.
News coverage of voting must explain all factors behind long voting lines -- including GOP voter suppression
Written by Zachary Pleat
Research contributions from Chloe Simon
Published
Voters in parts of both Texas and California faced very long wait times to cast their ballots. In California’s case, reporting suggests it was mostly attributable to technology problems. But Texas, where some voters were still in line hours after the polls closed, has a history of efforts to suppress voting.
Texas had been required by a provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to get preclearance from the federal government before making changes to its election laws because of its history of discrimination -- until the Supreme Court struck down that section of the law in 2013. Since then, the GOP-controlled state has taken actions that could impede voting: passing a voter ID law which was repeatedly struck down as racially discriminatory until the state added additional options; passing a law that resulted in closures of numerous polling sites on college campuses; and shutting down 750 polling sites statewide, mostly affecting areas where minority populations are growing the fastest. Some other Texas GOP attempts to restrict voting have failed.
Some media coverage from outside the state effectively highlighted Texas’ past voter suppression efforts. Vox’s report on the long lines in Texas noted the likelihood that the problem was due to more than just larger-than-expected voter turnout, calling long lines at the polls a “perennial problem in America” and pointing out that “Texas in particular has been making it harder for people to vote since” the 2013 VRA ruling. The Hill’s story mentioned that “the long voting lines come as state officials have shut down hundreds of polling sites in recent years, with one study indicating that as many as 540 poll sites in areas of strong minority population growth were closed.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow followed up a live report from a Texas polling site affected by long lines by explaining that “some of this is deliberate.”
Video file
Citation
From the March 4, 2020, edition of MSNBC's Super Tuesday: Decision 2020
RACHEL MADDOW (CO-HOST): I will say, we had talked about this a little bit earlier. In Texas, McLennan County, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places between 2012 and 2018. During that time, its population grew by more than 15,000 people. More than two-thirds of that growth, African American and Latino population growth. In the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latino population between 2012 and 2018, those are populations where the -- counties where the population rose by two and a half million people. Texas, between 2012 and 2018, closed 542 of the polling places in those 50 counties.
BRIAN WILLIAMS (CO-HOST): I wonder why they’d do a thing like that?
MADDOW: This is something that is systematically underway in Texas. Texas is not the only state that is contending with this, and Texas is not the only state with lines tonight. But some of this is deliberate.
WILLIAMS: So who do the people of Texas see about that?
MADDOW: Well, they see their state representatives in state government, and they can only do so if they're allowed in free and fair elections to choose them.
WILLIAMS: I know our Justice Department has a civil rights unit.
MADDOW: Yeah -- used to also have a Voting Rights Act. It's infuriating.
And a CNN panel also discussed at length how Republican efforts to restrict voting were likely contributing to the long lines in Texas.
Video file
Citation
From the March 4, 2020, edition of CNN's America's Choice 2020: Super Tuesday
DON LEMON (ANCHOR): Let's talk about what's happening now because the polls are still open in Texas and they should be closed. People are waiting six hours in line. No one in America should be waiting six hours in line.
RON BROWNSTEIN (CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST): And that's a feature, not a bug.
LEMON: Go on.
BROWNSTEIN: Texas, a Republican-run state, has taken a whole bunch of steps to make it harder to register and then harder to vote. They've closed a lot of polling places.
LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ (POLITICO NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER): Yeah, 750 polling places have been closed since 2012. And then specifically in Black and Latino neighborhoods in Texas, 542 polling sites have been closed.
…
ANDREW GILLUM (CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR): But I think the point is extremely clear, which is this is by design. I watched it happen in Florida through Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and communities that were largely made up of folks of color --
LEMON: Look at these folks here. Most of the people in those lines are Black. But go on.
GILLUM: But look, this is -- where I vote, and my wife and I live in a pretty good neighborhood, if we are there longer than 15 minutes, people are starting to hit their watch and say what's going on, something's wrong with the system. And many of these neighborhoods, they're used to having to wait an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, and for it to be the norm. It's unacceptable.
LEMON: Why? Why is this happening?
GILLUM: Well, deliberately. [CROSSTALK]
BROWNSTEIN: Shelby -- Shelby County -- John Roberts.
GILLUM: Shelby County -- We no longer have preclearance. You now have state legislatures that are deliberately creating laws that are systemically intended to suppress a part of the constituency that they don't want to show up.
…
BROWNSTEIN: Since Shelby county. I mean, you know, that decision -- John Roberts, 5-4, five Republican-appointed justices outvoting four Democratic-appointed justices -- John Roberts said that basically voter suppression was a thing of the past, and that we, you know, he threw out the preclearance, in a decision that he wrote himself, threw out the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of ‘65. And since then, as the mayor said, it has been -- there's just tremendous --
GILLUM: Explosion.
BROWNSTEIN: -- of laws that have the effect of suppressing access to the ballot. But in Texas in particular, the strategy of closing polling places to create these kinds of lines -- that is not a -- what you're seeing is not an accident. It is not that states don't know how to administer elections. They know exactly what they're doing, and what they're doing is supposed to produce exactly what we are seeing.
But Texas-based news outlets gave their audiences insufficient context behind the long lines Texans faced. And articles about the long lines from the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Houston television station KHOU, and the UT-Austin-based Texas Standard reported on problems with broken or insufficient voting machines and/or staffing problems -- but made no mention of any GOP voting restrictions, even though the Republican-dominated state government has refused to fund new voting machines requested by county governments for the 2020 election.
As media reporter Michael Calderone wrote in response to a video about the long voting lines in Texas, news organizations must cover voting rights as a topic of importance -- especially when covering problems with voting. This MSNBC segment from March 4 did an excellent job providing all the context that could be behind the Texas voting delays:
Video file
Citation
From the March 4, 2020, edition of MSNBC's MSNBC Live
CHRIS JANSING (ANCHOR): There is outrage today over what we saw at some polling places yesterday. Two of the most populated states in the country, California and Texas, where the possibility of record turnout, we should say, was known. Long lines and crazy long waits of two, three hours, up to seven hours -- seven hours to exercise your right to vote.
…
Joining me now is university professor at the New School and MSNBC legal analyst Maya Wiley and MSNBC correspondent Garrett Haake in Houston, Texas, who saw some of those lines for himself. You were at the polling place, Garrett, at Texas Southern. What was it like there? I mean, it just sounded ridiculous, actually.
GARRETT HAAKE (MSNBC CORRESPONDENT): Ridiculous is a good word for it, Chris. We were wrapping up our coverage. It was 11:30 at night here and we heard that there were still people who had been waiting to vote since the polls had closed more than four and a half hours earlier. We went to the campus of Texas Southern and found maybe a hundred people still in line. Some of them told me they had been waiting there five and a half, six hours to get in line. So many things had gone wrong at this polling place, whether it was machines that weren't working, staffers who hadn't shown up, just problem after problem after problem. And the people I spoke to were furious. Take a listen.
(VIDEO BEGINS)
VOTER #1: The whole time we've been out here, none of the machines have been functioning the way they said they was. And there’s only two people signing people up.
VOTER #2: It made me think, this must be what voter suppression looks like. That's the only thought that I could come up with. It's kind of sad that, you know, that people would go to those kind of lengths. I don't know that that's the case, but it certainly looked like voter suppression to me.
(VIDEO ENDS)
HAAKE: Chris, that feeling was pervasive. This is the polling place on the campus of a historically Black college. There was a feeling like that perhaps this was done in some way intentionally to make it harder for these folks to vote. The people I interviewed said, "Well hell no, we're not going anywhere, we're going to stick it out." But it’s impossible to know how many people didn't, and that’s really frustrating here in the most populous county in this state.
…
MAYA WILEY (MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST): You know, this is such a shocking story, except it's not. And what I mean by that is of course we should be shocked by what we're seeing. People want to vote. People died in this country to vote. We just commemorated the march in Selma, marching for voting rights. But the thing about Texas in particular is it has a long history of making it hard, particularly for people of color to vote and in the last decade, very intentionally setting up many barriers to vote. Let me just give you one example. They have closed 750 polling sites across the state. And over 500 of those are in places with large Black and Latino populations. If you close polling sites, you put more pressure on other polling sites. The other thing that we've seen in Texas is purging the rolls. We had that -- you know, last year, remember that scandal of 95,000 people, most of whom were citizens, being told, "We don't believe you're a citizen," and even referring those cases for criminal prosecution. Total egg on the face of the state government for that, rightly so, because that's not a real problem. And I think one of the things that we've seen in this country as a whole is, rather than parties fighting to gain the support of voters, making it harder for voters parties think they won't for them to vote. And that is not democracy.