Texas says supply chain issues have limited the number of voter registration forms it can give out

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The Texas secretary of state’s office is having more trouble than usual getting enough voter registration cards to groups who help Texans register to vote.

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, said supply chain issues have made it harder and more expensive to get paper, which means the secretary of state’s office will be giving out fewer voter registration forms to groups ahead of elections this year.

“We are limited in what we can supply this year, because of the paper shortage and the cost constraints due to the price of paper and the supply of paper,” he said.

Grace Chimene, the president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, said it is not unusual for the secretary of state to not have enough forms to fill all the requests it gets from groups like hers ahead of elections. This particular shortage, however, is affecting an important part of her group’s work: registering thousands of newly naturalized citizens.

Chimene said in previous years, her group, which has chapters across the state, has been able to get enough forms to pass out at naturalization ceremonies. Often, she said, the group partners with the state to give out several thousand forms at each ceremony.

“The League in Houston registers about 30,000 new citizens every year through these ceremonies in the past,” Chimene said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a mix of in-person and remote ceremonies. Chimene said her group has either been handing out voter registration materials at in-person events or they’ve been sending out packets they put together ahead of time to those new citizens.

Either way, the league and their volunteers often ask for thousands of voter registration forms ahead of these ceremonies.

“It’s a really important job that we do and we value it, and I think the new citizens value it also," Chimene said.

Taylor said the secretary of state’s office has been forced to limit each group to 1,000 to 2,000 registration forms per request. He said this shortage is coming at a time when many groups are seeking out new voter registration forms because of a change in Texas’ voter registration laws created under Senate Bill 1, a controversial voting law that went into effect last month.

“The voter registration application changed this year for one reason: It’s because the legislature decided to increase the penalty for illegal voter registration from a class B misdemeanor to a class A misdemeanor,” he said.

Previously, Taylor said that change had to be reflected on registration applications in order for them to be approved. But, after this story was published Tuesday, he clarified that's not necessarily the case.

“While we have made clear to officials and groups that they should not be distributing the old version of the Voter Registration form, county voter registrars may accept completed voter registration applications on the old form, so long as the application is otherwise valid,” Taylor said in a statement Tuesday. “In other words, using last year’s form in and of itself is not fatal to the voter’s registration application.”

Chimene said all these constraints present serious issues for her group as they try to get voter registration materials together ahead of these large naturalization ceremonies.

“We are treating all organizations that request these the same,” Taylor said. “We are trying to fulfill these requests as fast we can. But the fact is we simply don’t have the supply to honor every single request for free applications.”

According to Chimene, this is one of the pitfalls of Texas being among the few states in the country that does not have online voter registration. Supply chain issues are not as big of a problem when you can just direct someone to a website.

She’s also worried about the message this sends to newly naturalized citizens, which she said have been under particular scrutiny by the secretary of state’s office recently. Chimene said the league is worried that newly naturalized, eligible voters are being targeted by the state’s latest focus on potential non-citizen voters.

“We are concerned about it, and we are looking into it,” Chimene said. “It just sort of all goes together: not providing the service they are supposed be providing to the citizens of Texas.”

Chimene said the secretary of state’s office has told the league to seek out donations instead of relying on the state for voter registration forms. She said she “didn’t appreciate” this considering the fact her group is a nonpartisan nonprofit. However, Chimene said, her group will try and do what it can.

"We will ask our supporters, we will ask our friends and our neighbors,” she said. “And find out if we could have somebody donate to get this done.”
https://www.rawstory.com/texas-says-sup ... -give-out/

Just another excuse to limit peoples right to vote. It would be interesting to know what Zip Codes are affected by this shortage.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Texas says supply chain issues have limited the number of voter registration forms it can give out

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Are they printed within Texas or shipped from other states or from overseas?

Adding to our supply chain problems are pilfering of railroad cars.

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Packaging debris and items stolen from rail cars litter train tracks Saturday in Lincoln Heights, drawing scavengers.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)



“Everything comes on the train — cellphones, Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools,” said a 37-year-old man who declined to give his name. He said he comes to the tracks regularly and once found a Louis Vuitton purse and a robotic arm worth five figures: “We find things here and there, make some money off of it.”

Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods.
Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County. The railroad didn’t release specific data on what was stolen or the value of what was lost but it said the increase in crime cost the company at least $5 million last year.

A bottleneck in the supply chain and the presence of homeless encampments near rail lines have contributed to the thefts, officials said.

“Organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft ... impacts our employees, our customers in the overall supply chain industry,” said Adrian Guerrero, a director of public affairs for Union Pacific.

Guerrero estimates that about 90 cargo containers a day are compromised, sometimes by an organized group that has halted trains and recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

Union Pacific is deploying more drones, has brought in extra security and enlisted the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to combat the thefts, Guerrero said.

But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

“We have millions of dollars of items and equipment, but it is unpoliced,” Hurtado said. “There are even sometimes weapons on these trains. Everything goes by train, you learn.”

The problem gained attention last week when KCBS and KCAL photojournalist John Schreiber posted a series of videos and tweets, including one of himself picking through discarded packages strewn along a rail line in Lincoln Heights.
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... ing-tracks
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Texas says supply chain issues have limited the number of voter registration forms it can give out

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And in Tarrant and Dallas counties the number of voter registration applications that are being rejected under the new law is running 40%.Travis county is almost 50%. Just another active voter suppression. The County Judges say the law has made it so they have to reject the application because the data the voter sends in doesn’t match what the Texas Sec. Of State has in their database.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Texas says supply chain issues have limited the number of voter registration forms it can give out

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TrueTexan wrote: Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:44 pm And in Tarrant and Dallas counties the number of voter registration applications that are being rejected under the new law is running 40%.Travis county is almost 50%. Just another active voter suppression. The County Judges say the law has made it so they have to reject the application because the data the voter sends in doesn’t match what the Texas Sec. Of State has in their database.
I'm hoping this will affect Republicans as much as Democrats. Let them get a taste of their own medicine.
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