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AUSTIN — The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Gov. Greg Abbott’s order limiting counties to one mail ballot drop-off site each.
The court’s decision dissolved a temporary restraining order that a lower court had imposed on state officials and that an appeals court had upheld Friday.
In a unanimous decision, the all-Republican Supreme Court, said Abbott’s Oct. 1 order was within state law and could move forward.
“The Governor’s October Proclamation provides Texas voters more ways to vote in the November 3 election than does the Election Code,” the court’s opinion read. “It does not disenfranchise anyone.”
The ruling is a major victory for Abbott, a Republican, whose order was harshly criticized by Democrats who decried it as an attempt to suppress turnout. Several Texas chapters of the Anti-Defamation League, the government watchdog group Common Cause, and two Texas voters filed suit against the state, saying Abbott’s order overstepped the governor’s authority in the Texas Constitution and violated equal rights of voters.
Texas Democrats denounced the move as a partisan decision to suppress turnout to benefit Republicans. It released a statement from State District Judge Amy Clark Meachum, the party’s candidate for chief justice of the Supreme Court, criticizing the decision.
“The all-Republican Texas Supreme Court is once again placing its party’s political interest ahead of public health, fundamental fairness and common sense,” Meachum said.
Before Abbott’s order, some counties, like Harris, which covers more than 1,700 square miles, had announced multiple locations where voters could drop off their mail ballots. Other counties, like Travis and Fort Bend, planned to announce multiple voting locations right before Abbott’s order was made public.
North Texas counties, including Dallas and Tarrant, had already decided on having only one drop-off location.
On Oct. 15, State District Judge Tim Sulak, a Democrat from Austin, blocked Abbott’s order saying it “needlessly and unreasonably” increased the risk of exposure to COVID-19 and made it harder for some voters to cast their ballots.
But the Texas Supreme Court agreed with the state’s argument that Abbott’s order merely amended an order he issued July 27, in which he extended early voting by six days and created more ways for voters to cast their ballots by allowing voters to return mail ballots in person at their early voting clerk’s office at any point before and up to Election Day.
The court also disagreed with the parties that brought the case that it unfairly burdened voters in larger and more populous counties. It said the parties had to prove that the motivating factor was an intent to discriminate, which they had not.
The court also said that “the plaintiffs’ assertion that the Constitution is violated when voters of one county face slightly greater logistical barriers than voters in another county finds no support in the case law” and therefore the plaintiffs had no right for relief from the judicial system and the lower courts had erred in blocking Abbott’s order.
“If taken seriously, this argument would condemn Texas’s county-based election apparatus to interminable litigation over the myriad minor differences between voters’ options in various counties throughout our diverse State.”