The local election news of the last few weeks reminds Lisa Morris of her mom.

Gloria Meeks, who lived in the Rolling Hills neighborhood of south Fort Worth, was an entrepreneur with a seemingly endless supply of energy. She operated her own catering company yet found time to cook fiesta dip and Texas King Ranch casserole for her kids and grandkids. She regularly joined a pilot friend on leisurely plane rides in the skies of North Texas and took two cruises almost every year.

On top of all that, she was devoted to ensuring the Black community exercised its right to vote. Meeks organized a phone bank for Democratic voters and assisted the elderly with their mail-in ballots during election seasons. “She was just a great lady,” says Democratic Fort Worth Congressman Marc Veasey. “She worked really hard. She liked getting out the vote.”

Then, in August 2006, investigators with the Texas Attorney General’s Office arrived at Meeks’ house. She was drying off from a bath when two male inspectors looked in through her bathroom window, according to a signed declaration. She screamed, and they waited outside to interview her until she got dressed. Meeks was never charged. She was one of many Fort Worth women to experience scrutiny regarding mail-in ballots, and the encounter convinced her the Attorney General’s Office was after her for no reason, leading to difficulty sleeping.

Later that year, Meeks had a stroke. Morris says her mother never fully recovered until her death in 2012 at age 75. The situation left Morris with a negative opinion of Greg Abbott, who was Attorney General at the time. “In all honesty, I believe he’s the reason my mother had a stroke,” she said.

Morris has been thinking about Abbott as mail-in ballots are again a hot topic in Texas. She wishes the governor would allow all voters to use them in this year’s election. “That’s just my personal opinion, and my mother would feel the same freaking way, if she was here today,” says Morris, an actress who lives in Haslet.

But Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have stood resolute in challenging attempts in court to expand usage of mail-in ballots, even as the coronavirus spreads through Texas. With early voting starting Monday for the July runoff and Election Day scheduled for July 14, this summer’s election will almost certainly come and go without expanded mail-in voting opportunities. And unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses a federal appeals court decision or Abbott files an executive order by November, the general election will be held under the same conditions.

Already, because of a voter photo ID law, a lack of online registration and a reduction of 750 polling places in recent years, Texas has fallen from just outside the top 10 in ease of voting in 1996 to 45th, according to an Election Law Journal study. And the refusal to expand mail-in voting puts Texas at further odds with the vast majority of the country — states that are as demographically and politically different as South Carolina and New York. Going into this year, 34 states allowed for anyone to use mail-in ballots. Of the remaining 16, all but Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have made exceptions to expand vote by mail in 2020 elections because of the pandemic.

In Texas, mail-in ballots are available only to people who are outside their home county on Election Day, are in jail, are 65-plus or claim to have a disability. The Texas Supreme Court, in May, agreed with the state in an opinion that a lack of immunity to COVID-19 was not a disability. But, the judges added, “The decision to apply to vote by mail based on a disability is the voter’s, subject to a correct understanding of the statutory definition of ‘disability’.” Paxton followed the decision by sending a letter to county officials explaining that any third party who advised someone to state they have a disability out of fear of coronavirus could be prosecuted.

Neither Paxton nor Abbott responded to interview requests made through their communications teams. In other interviews and press releases they have stated their opposition to expanding mail-in ballots because of the potential for widespread fraud (as has the Tarrant County Republican Party).

The consensus among voting advocates is that the most equitable way to hold an election in this unprecedented year is by giving voters alternate avenues to vote, especially as traditional polling sites have diminished because of a paucity of election workers and volunteers. And reports have shown expanded mail-in voting neither favors one party over the other. While election fraud cases happen more often with mail-in ballots than other voting methods, the expansion of mail-in voting has not led to a rise in excessive fraud.

“What we’re seeing from the attorney general and governor is they want to make it harder to vote in Texas,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican who has worked as a general counsel for the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush and John McCain. “That’s not consistent with our democratic ideals. It’s a bad thing for the country.”

Potter, who is the president of the Campaign Legal Center, is concerned the plan supported by Abbott will leave Texas with the worst of both worlds this year: Elections that have far fewer polling locations and limited access to mail-in voting.

That situation may especially affect Black and Hispanic populations who have been disproportionately affected by coronavirus and have been found to be disenfranchised by the application of Texas voting laws. Jane Hamilton, a Dallas-based political consultant who once worked with Meeks and other neighborhood leaders in Fort Worth, sees the politicians’ disavowal of expanded mail-in voting because of fraud as another way to sow confusion and fear among residents — as happened with Meeks — for a voting strategy that would be the safest and most convenient.

“There was a saying that started in those communities,” Hamilton said. “Vote by mail, go to jail.”

Rise of racism accusations in mail-ballot prosecutions

Texas has had mail-in ballots for more than 100 years, along with occasional fraud investigations. But mail-in ballots started to become a bigger issue for state leaders in the early 2000s.

Steve Wolens, then a Dallas-based Democratic state representative, had been suspicious of fraud in several of his contested elections, as well as in the 2001 election of former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, his wife. So in 2003 he sponsored legislation that increased penalties for several mail-in voting fraud infractions, like filling in another person’s ballot without consent. He believed that the possibility of jail time and heavy fines would create a strict deterrent that had been previously missing.

But the legislation, which passed with bipartisan support, also made it a crime for assisting voters with mail-in ballots, unless certain conditions were met. Black and Hispanic legislators criticized the language as too broad and warned it could be used with a discriminatory effect, particularly because assistance with elderly voters was a common practice in their communities.

Three years later, Abbott, as attorney general, publicized a plan to go after election fraud with a $1.5 million grant. In a February 2006 editorial published in various Texas newspapers, he called it an epidemic “infesting the electoral process.” “The fact is, voter fraud allegations are surfacing in communities from the Rio Grande to the Red River, from the Pecos to the Piney Woods.”

Despite the claims of a statewide fraud epidemic, 12 people (all Black or with Hispanic surnames) hailing from five counties were successfully prosecuted in 2006 and 2007, according to data from the attorney general’s office. Nine of the 12 people convicted were for technical violations, like possessing another person’s valid ballot. Willie Ray, a Texarkana city councilwoman, claimed she and her niece, who was also indicted, had taken voters’ ballots to the mailbox.

The Dallas Morning News, in 2008, found that all the people who had been charged with election fraud in the two years were Democrats. Three years earlier, Abbott was criticized for bypassing the prosecution of an incident at a polling location in Highland Park where more than 100 ballots were mishandled.

Meeks joined a lawsuit with five others who had been investigated or prosecuted, as well as the Texas Democrats. They accused Abbott and the state of using the 2003 law to target people based on technicalities rather than fraudulent activities and of discriminating against voters of color. According to the lawsuit, the Attorney General’s Office used a Powerpoint to educate election officials on how to spot potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots by looking for “unique” stamps. The example picture was a stamp of a black woman holding a baby below the words “Test early for sickle cell.”

In May 2008, the parties settled just before the start of a federal trial in East Texas, both claiming victory. Part of the settlement terms included a rethinking of the policy that led to the plaintiffs being investigated and prosecuted for handling valid ballots. Matt Angle, whose Democratic-leaning Lone Star political action committee helped organize the lawsuit, said the settlement helped fix a flawed application of Wolens’ legislation, which was a win for Angle’s side. “If they didn’t lose they wouldn’t have settled,” Angle said of the Attorney General’s Office.

Wolens declined to share his opinion on how Abbott applied his legislation. In addition to working as principal at the McKool Smith law firm, he has become a prominent supporter of expanding mail-in ballots for all voters, recently appearing in a panel with the secretary of state of Washington, where almost all votes are conducted by mail. “The conversation now where people who are opposed to universal mail-in balloting, they talk about potential for abuse but it’s not well-founded,” he said. “And I tell you anecdotally, it’s not well founded since we passed that law in 2003.”

AG’s office continues to prosecute

Since 2008, about 120 people have been successfully prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Office on 394 counts (more than 60 million votes have been cast in Texas in even-year elections during that time period). About two-thirds of those counts relate to mail-in ballots. The vast majority of cases involve South Texas.

It has been even rarer for the Attorney General’s Office to bring down large scale fraud operations. Since 2008, only six people have been convicted of more than 10 election fraud counts and rarely have large networks of people been convicted together for defrauding the same election. A Huffington Post report in 2018 showed that of the 33 cases resolved that year by the attorney general all but three led to diversion programs. (Not all election fraud cases are taken over by the attorney general’s office; local authorities can prosecute offenses without any assistance).

The people convicted are rarely powerful politicians but often workers or volunteers, like Cynthia Kay Gonzalez. She pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor election fraud charges in 2018 in San Patricio County and received probation. Her attorney, Joel Thomas, said she was working in the 2016 runoff for a Robstown politician who was running for constable and secured the mail vote of an elderly man at a nursing home. A representative for another candidate brought the man to a polling place, Thomas said, and he was told by election workers he had already voted. Thomas described it as a situation where neither his client nor the elderly man fully realized what they were doing.

The conservative advocacy organization Direct Action Texas filed 30 fraud complaints with the attorney general in that Robstown election, and two others besides Gonzalez were charged, a woman named Rosita Flores and the male winner of a municipal utility board race. That politician was found not guilty, while Flores and Gonzalez faced legal repercussions. Rather than fight the attorney general’s office, Thomas said Gonzalez took a plea deal because she was anxious.

“They get on their high horse every so often and try to round up a bunch of cases like this,” Thomas said. “It makes news, and they move on to something else.”

Push to remove fear from mail-in voting

Meeks always considered the lawsuit against Abbott a victory. When she died in 2012, a passage in the program presented to guests at her funeral read, “Her most triumphant and challenging accomplishment was going against the Texas State Attorney General ... in a civil action to assure that elderly voters in Texas could have assistance in casting their absentee ballots.”

Even with the lawsuit settlement, it remained difficult to encourage mail-in voting in parts of Texas. In Fort Worth, after what happened to Meeks and others, the women who would aid elderly voters stopped wanting to help, and the local Democratic Party often couldn’t help them over the phone. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore,” said Hamilton, the political consultant. “And so it ended up being that something we were proud of (became) something our communities feared and wouldn’t touch it.”

Fewer than 1 in 5 Tarrant County voters over age 65 cast a mail-in ballot in November 2018. According to a census survey, 11% of Black voters used mail-in ballots nationwide in 2018, about half the rate of white and Hispanic voters.

These discrepancies and the stigma associated with mail-in voting in Texas is a reason voting rights advocates want not only mail-in ballot expansion but also a campaign to educate all Texans that they can vote by mail without mistrust. “Texas is not doing aggressive public education among those who are already eligible for it in communities that don’t tend to use it,” said Myrna Pérez, a former San Antonio resident who is director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program. “At least nationwide in other states there tends to be a higher usage in vote by mail among folks who are older and white. And to end that racial disparity in Texas, it would need to provide public education among communities that are eligible, and we don’t see that happening.”

Josh Levin, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, noted that even for those allowed to vote by mail in Texas the act requires a “poll tax” of a postage stamp for an application for a ballot and then another stamp for the actual ballot. “They could help and should help,” he said of the state. “Instead they’re going to do everything they can to prevent people from voting.”

The interest for mail-in voting seems to be rising this year. Edwardean Harris, the longtime Democratic chair in the 1005 voting precinct in south Fort Worth, has made many phone calls to remind people of the July runoff. The question she kept hearing over and over from residents was whether they could vote by mail in order to avoid physical polling locations. “And I really don’t blame them. ... It’s convenient. You’re not exposed,” Harris said.

She just wishes she could tell everyone they could do it. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she said.

Mark Dent bio

Mark Dent is an investigative reporter for the Star-Telegram, covering everything from politics to education to sports and beyond. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Vox and many other publications. Send tips and taco recommendations to mdent@star-telegram.com.