On October 1, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbot issued an order prohibiting counties in Texas from opening more than one absentee ballot drop off location. Criticized by Texas Democrats as an attempt at voter suppression only a month before the election, the policy means voters across Texas must travel longer distances if they hope to avoid relying on the postal system by mailing their ballot or else risking contracting COVID-19 by voting in-person.
On October 10, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman blocked Abbot’s order, ruling that it “likely violates [Texans’] fundamental right to vote.” The following day, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a stay while the state of Texas appeals the ruling, temporarily reinstating Abbot’s limit on ballot drop off sites.
On October 8, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster temporarily blocked a similar policy enacted in Ohio by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, which prevents county boards of elections from offering multiple absentee ballot drop boxes. On October 9, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a stay pending appeal, temporarily reinstating LaRose’s limit on drop boxes.
This policy of restricting absentee ballot drop off sites raises an interesting geographic question: What does one drop off location per county really look like?
Last week, I cast my vote in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which borders D.C. Like many Marylanders, I voted absentee, in order to avoid standing in line next to people potentially infected with COVID-19. Not wanting my ballot to be delayed in the mail, I chose to hand-deliver it to one of the five absentee ballot drop boxes within a fifteen-minute drive of my home.
Curious about how this experience compares with that of an absentee voter in Texas, I constructed the pair of maps below, showing the distribution of absentee ballot drop off locations in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Dallas County, Texas. The limits of the city of Dallas, which fall almost entirely in Dallas County, are shown. The maps are on the same geographic scale.
Dallas County covers a land area of 873 square miles, or roughly 80% more than Prince George’s County, at 483 square miles. Dallas County also contains about 2.63 million residents, or nearly three times as many as Prince George’s County, at 910,000, according to US Census Bureau estimates. We should therefore expect Dallas County to have at least as many locations as Prince George’s. Yet Prince George’s County has 42 absentee ballot drop off locations, and Dallas County has only one.
In terms of geographic density, Prince George’s County offers one absentee ballot drop off site per 11.5 square miles of area. As a result of Governor Abbot’s order, Dallas County offers only one site for its 873 square miles of land area.
And Dallas isn’t even Texas’s largest county. Brewster County, in West Texas, covers 6,184 square miles of land yet has only one location where voters can hand-deliver absentee ballots. To drop off an absentee ballot, someone living in a community near the US-Mexico border can expect a three-hour round-trip drive to the county seat of Alpine. They’ll likely need to take a day off of work, since Brewster County’s ballot drop off is closed on weekends, and after 5pm on most weekdays.
The below pair of maps shows the ballot drop off locations in Brewster County and Prince George’s County, again to scale.
This shortage of absentee ballot drop off sites is just one obstacle facing Texas voters. Texas restricts vote-by-mail to people 65 or older, incarcerated, out of their county during election day and the early voting period, or sick or with a disability, standing in contrast to nearly all other US states, which require no excuse for absentee voting or consider COVID-19 risk a sufficient reason.
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