repost from LB
You can bet the Texas swamp critters are going to come out big about this!
Texas procedure for ballots with mismatched signatures reinstated by federal court
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-ballots-mismatched-signatures-federal-court
Texas law require signatures on ballot envelopes to be compared with those on ballot applications
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Texas' voting rules that call for signatures on absentee ballots to be verified.
In a Monday order, the court blocked a U.S. District Court injunction, noting that the lower court's decision "minimize[d]" Texas' interest in election integrity, emphasizing the heightened need for security as greater numbers of mailed ballots raise the potential for fraud.
"Because Texas’s strong interest in safeguarding the integrity of its elections from voter fraud far outweighs any burden the state’s voting procedures place on the right to vote, we stay the injunction pending appeal," Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote in the court's opinion.
Texas law calls for the signature on the carrier envelope ballots to be returned with the signature on the initial absentee ballot application, and potentially with two or more signatures that the Early Voting Ballot Board may already have on file from the previous six years. Ballots may be deemed invalid and therefore not counted if the signatures do not match.
Two Texas voters, George Richardson of Brazos County and Rosalie Weisfeld of McAllen, joined by organizations representing Texans with disabilities, veterans and young voters, filed a lawsuit over a year ago arguing that the way state law allows local election officials to reject mail-in ballots based on mismatching signatures violates the Fourteenth Amendment's right to due process.
The District Court ordered that voters whose signatures are perceived to be mismatching must be mailed a notice of the election board’s determination within one day, and, in the event that a voter believes his or her ballot was improperly rejected, the voter may seek to verify the ballot by contacting an election official via phone or mail, Garcia ruled.
If a phone number was included on the voter’s original ballot application, an election official must also make at least one phone call within one day notifying the voter that his or her ballot is pending rejection based on a perceived signature mismatch, the District Court said.
The Fifth Circuit recognized that the Texas Secretary of State had already issued guidance calling for election officials to notify voters of ballot problems as soon as possible, and published a letter with guidance on how to properly fill out ballots.
Monday's ruling also pointed out that neither the lower court nor the plaintiffs had adequately supported their Fourteenth Amendment argument.
"The Fourteenth Amendment says that states may not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' In its conscientious 103-page order, the district court didn’t cite the Fourteenth Amendment—the sole constitutional provision it purported to interpret on the merits—even once. It’s no surprise, then, that the court also failed to identify the category of interest—life, liberty, or property—at stake in the right to vote. The plaintiffs’ brief is similarly silent."
The Fifth Circuit ruled that the right to vote cannot be considered a property interest, and noted that not only did the plaintiffs fail to argue how the right to vote by mail is a liberty interest, they made no argument of the sort about the right to vote at all.