Question

Explain the barriers to voting percentages in Texas.

Answer 1

The display of political energy is in contrast to the long record of lackluster voter turnout in Texas. According to the United States Elections Study, which measures voter turnout based on state election office data, Texas' 28.9 per cent turnout in the last mid-term election in 2014 was less than 1 percentage point higher than the dead-last Indiana's. A large percentage of Texans are youth and Latinos, two groups of people who are less likely to vote than the people in general. Critics say a requirement for voter ID, which came into force in 2013 and faced years of legal challenges, has also played a part.

And Republican domination has eroded resources for the rival Democrats and stifled competition for more than two decades. The United States Elections Project found that in Texas' 30 largest counties, 2.4 million people cast ballots in the first days of early voting, exceeding the combined early voting and mail-in balloting totals in the 2014 midterm.
The crackdown on illegal immigration by the Trump administration, and the frequent use of heated language by the president to describe immigrants from Mexico and Central America, seems to energize Latino voters in Texas and elsewhere. Voting rights advocates in Texas and elsewhere are also fighting back against what they see as Republican attempts to curb youth and minority voting, which appears to favor Democrats. A lawsuit filed by students at historically black Prairie View A&M University in Waller County indicted that restrictions on early voting suppressed African-Americans' voting rights. Officials in rural southeast Texas county responded this month by expanding voting hours and opening a new polling ground.