Latino groups denounce laws that make it harder to help disabled and language-challenged voters

Three states are enacting tighter restrictions on people who help voters with disabilities, language issues or other challenges cast ballots. Latino groups that have sued Texas, Arkansas and Missouri over those laws are warning that those who need help voting in the November election may not get the help they need.

“A lot of Latino voters have disabilities or English is not their first language. They also don’t know how to use the voting machines and they get really nervous, so they ask someone to help them check their vote,” said Tania Chavez Camacho, executive director of the Texas nonprofit La Unión del Pueblo Entero, known as LUPE.

“But now the state requires that if you want to help a voter, you have to take an oath that says if you break the rules, you can be punished: That’s for volunteers. Ultimately, some people don’t vote because of these obstacles,” Chavez Camacho said, referring to Texas’ SB 1 bill, which went into effect in 2021.

By law, assistants must fill out new paperwork disclosing their relationship to the voter and swear an oath to limit their assistance and to certify that they did not “pressure or coerce” the voter into electing them as an assistant. The oath is taken under penalty of perjury, a state crime that carries a prison sentence.

Under the Voting Rights Act, voters who need assistance because they are blind, disabled or illiterate can get assistance at the polls. But Texas volunteers say SB 1 makes it harder to provide that assistance.

“Sometimes we are afraid to help people who ask for help to accompany them to vote. Because you have to take an oath that says that if you make a mistake, the vote does not count and you can even go to jail. This is very scary for me,” explained María Cristela Rocha, a member of LUPE.

“The law doesn’t specifically define how that rule is violated, so if I’m at a polling place helping a voter and an election worker says I did something wrong, now I can be found guilty just for wanting to help,” Chavez Camacho said. “For us, that’s very concerning because neither our staff nor our volunteers feel comfortable helping people who want to go to the polls to vote. As an organization, it prevents us from doing our job.”

The Brennan Center for Justice, which focuses on voting rights, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) are part of the legal team representing LUPE and other organizations in a federal lawsuit against Texas over the law.

“We can no longer help people”

SB 1 could also be used to criminalize nonpartisan voter recruitment and would severely restrict the activities of election officials by creating a new felony punishable by prison for delivering absentee ballot applications to eligible voters who do not request one.

The lawsuit details that more than 277,000 voting-age U.S. citizens who have limited English proficiency live in Texas counties that are not required to provide materials in their native language. The citizens are disproportionately Asian American and Latino, the groups that filed the lawsuit say.

The trial began last year in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, but there has been no verdict in the case.

Former Texas Secretary of State John B. Scott, current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and five other state officials are named as defendants in the lawsuit. Telemundo News reached out to all those named in the lawsuit for comment but only received a response from Lisa Wise, El Paso County’s elections administrator. In an email, she said she could not comment “as this is an ongoing lawsuit.”

In court documents reviewed by Noticias Telemundo, some state officials involved in the lawsuit expressed concerns about the “ambiguity” of some sections of the SB 1 bill. Additionally, election administrators testified that in their experience, “no voter was confused or unduly manipulated” by community organizations.

In July 2021, Paxton wrote on X: “Measures to ensure election integrity have nothing to do with race, but everything to do with making voting easier and fraud harder.”

SB 1 was part of a series of Republican-sponsored bills that were created in response to false accusations by former President Donald Trump and other Republicans of voter fraud in the 2020 election, accusations that still stand.

“The fact is, voter fraud is real,” the bill’s author, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, said in a 2021 statement posted on the website of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group. “We value the voices of every Texan and will defend their right to express them at the ballot box.”

Democratic state Rep. Diego Bernal told the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 2021: “Over the past 17 years, Texas has prosecuted 154 cases of voter fraud out of 94 million total votes cast. The probability of voter fraud in Texas is lower than the probability of any of us being struck by lightning.”

In their lawsuit, the groups argue that the Texas law is a “reaction” to changing demographics in the electorate, citing that it “is now more racially diverse and younger than ever before.” They cite official data showing that Latino voter turnout was about 56% in 2020, meaning Latino votes made up more than a fifth of all votes cast in the state.

Laura MacCleery, senior policy director at UnidosUS, a national Latino civil rights organization, said her research shows a correlation between enforcement of laws like SB 1 and Latino demographics.

“We have to remember that the number of Latino voters who turned out in 2020 was higher than the number needed to swing the presidential election. And where the Latino population, the influential new voters and the eligible citizens are growing, we’re now seeing pressure to restrict voting rights, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” MacCleery, whose organization is not involved in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

Official data collected by UnidosUS shows that 18 million Latinos are registered to vote, making them the second-largest group of voting-age Americans. But there are 31.2 million Latinos of voting age, so researchers at the organization say that “addressing the voter registration gap is a critical opportunity to achieve full Latino representation in elections.”

Arkansas and Missouri also restrict election aid

The Texas case is not an isolated one. MALDEF has also sued Arkansas and Missouri for limiting assistance available to voters who do not speak English well or have disabilities.

“The state of Arkansas limits the number of people who can be helped to vote. One person can only help six voters in each election; if they exceed that number, they are breaking the law and can be subject to criminal prosecution,” Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, said in an interview.

“In Missouri, the rules are more stringent and state that no one can help more than one voter in one election unless they are an election judge or are helping immediate family members,” Saenz said.

Unlike Texas, the lawsuits in Arkansas and Missouri were filed against older laws. The challenge in Missouri was to a law passed in 1977, while in Arkansas it is to a law enacted in the 1990s. There are about 83,000 Hispanic voters eligible to vote in Arkansas, according to the Pew Research Center; in Missouri, it is 125,000.

“The quotas are a huge barrier in Arkansas because we have almost no bilingual election workers,” said Mireya Reith, executive director of Arkansas United, one of the advocacy groups involved in the lawsuit. “We’re one of only three states in the United States where everything is in English and ballots aren’t translated. And because we can only help six people, our organization can’t serve all of the Latino voters who need assistance because they don’t speak English or have disabilities.”

Although a federal judge ruled in August 2022 that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act by implementing the six-voter limit, the state appealed that decision and the case now heads to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

“Unfortunately, the judge in the Missouri case decided to wait for the appeals in Arkansas to be decided because they raise similar issues,” Saenz said. “So we’re waiting for the 8th Circuit to rule, which will affect both cases, but we won’t make a decision until after the election, so Latino voters in those states will have to vote again under the restrictions.”

Telemundo News has requested responses from all state and local officials named in both lawsuits. In the case of Arkansas, authorized spokespersons for the secretary of state and the State Board of Election Commissioners said they could not comment on the lawsuit while it is in the appeals process. Missouri officials did not respond to the request.

In the Arkansas case, state officials argued at the hearing that the purpose of the six-voter limit is to “prevent helpers from improperly influencing voter decisions” at the polls. Without the six-voter limit, officials argued, “busloads of people” could go to the polls and “receive fraudulent help from the same person.”

Reith, for his part, says there is no evidence of such fraud in the state and that the biggest fear Latinos in Arkansas have is making a mistake when voting, which is why they sometimes “prefer not to vote.”

“We haven’t been able to meet the demand, so we’re going to prioritize counties with higher Latino voter populations, but 60% of immigrants in Arkansas live in rural communities of less than 8,000 people, so we’re never going to be able to reach everyone, and we want them to know they have a right to get help,” Reith said.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Rocha says she is excited because at age 62, this will be the first election she will be able to vote in since becoming a citizen.

“I became a citizen precisely because we are tired of having our rights taken away. We will continue to fight because we cannot deny people help, right?” she said.

An earlier version of this story was published on Noticias Telemundo.