Why Texas doesn't have online voter registration

For the vast majority of Americans, registering to vote is easier than ordering food delivery from a phone app. Not so in Texas, where, unlike 42 states and Washington, D.C., not all residents are offered the convenience. Instead, Texans must obtain a paper copy of the application and mail it in, happen across voter registrars who get them signed up, or are lucky enough to be registered by volunteers with the League of Women Voters at a naturalization ceremony when they become new U.S. citizens. There is one exception: a federal judge in 2020 forced Texas to allow online voter registration when residents renew or update their driver licenses using the Texas Department of Public Safety website, after ruling the state was violating federal law. In the first year and a half of the program, 1.5 million residents used that option, according to state data.

With the Texas Legislature set to reconvene in January, multiple lawmakers, including state Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, have filed bills to create a statewide online voter registration system for all eligible voters, not just those updating driver license paperwork. The legislation is nothing new — Alvarado and others have been proposing the bill for a decade — but it remains unclear whether state leadership will consider it. As online voter registration has become the norm across the country, it appears to have become more controversial in Texas, not less. The Texas House passed a bill in 2011 creating online voter registration, with only one member voting against it. However, the bill died when a Senate committee did not take it up. A similar bipartisan bill in 2015 was co-authored by 76 House members, indicating a majority of the House would have voted for the measure had it been brought to a vote. It was quashed when the Harris County Clerk and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector's offices rallied opposition, arguing it would make Texas more vulnerable to voter fraud. At the time, both of those elected offices were run by Republicans but since have flipped to Democrats.