Analysis: Texas lawmakers are business-friendly, however not businesslike

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Government will not be a enterprise and doesn’t run like one. That “run government like a business” motto you hear from political candidates comes from the “tastes great, less filling” college of promoting.

The slogan hides elementary variations between authorities and enterprise. One serves everybody, the opposite serves solely prospects. One doesn’t must make a revenue to maintain working. Business house owners can promote out and go away; taxpayers don’t get that possibility. That’s only the start of an inventory that’s taller than you’re.

That doesn’t imply authorities can’t steal concepts from enterprise, nevertheless it’s rarer than you would possibly count on.

Texas is within the first weeks of the 2022 election cycle. Voters have lower than two weeks to register to vote within the occasion primaries. Early voting begins on Feb. 14, and March 1 is election day.

In an ideal instance of horrible timing, the Texas secretary of state’s workplace has a scarcity of voter registration playing cards, a predicament the company is blaming on kinks within the provide chain for paper. According to KUT News, which first reported the issue, the state gained’t give civic teams greater than 2,000 of these varieties every, limiting the power of these organizations to run voter drives upfront of the primaries.

Paper is dear and arduous to get, in contrast with regular occasions, and the state’s election workplace can’t meet demand for the varieties that permit folks to enroll to vote.

The best resolution can be to ditch the paper and let folks register to vote on-line. Business would soar at one thing like that, eliminating each the provision chain’s hiccups and the price of paper, printing and postage. But in Texas, on-line voter registration isn’t authorized.

There is a bizarre hybrid possibility. You can log on and fill out a voter registration utility. But as an alternative of hitting a button to finish the applying and shifting on to a different chore, it’s a must to print out the applying you could have stuffed out, signal it and put it within the mail.

Your paper, your stamp.

One would possibly argue that this isn’t burdensome, that on-line registration with out the printing and the stamp nonetheless requires folks to have computer systems and on-line entry.

Business folks would work to eliminate any friction within the course of, to chop out additional steps that may hinder a buyer on the best way to a sale, or a vote. It’s simpler to order garden chairs on-line than it’s to register to vote in Texas.

The tech is there and in most components of the U.S., so is the will to make it simple. In 42 states and the District of Columbia, voters can register on-line, in line with the National Association of State Legislatures. Same-day registration is authorized in 20 states and Washington, D.C., permitting residents to register to vote on the identical day they solid their ballots. That’s one thing enterprise would possibly do: Cut out the additional deadline and any excuse the voter might need to skip an election.

Nobody will confess to having a distinct purpose, however Texas nonetheless has little obstacles constructed into the election system that lawmakers have spent a lot of their time tinkering with.

During the 2020 elections, native officers regarded for methods to make voting much less dangerous for Texans dealing with COVID-19. Some expanded curbside voting. Harris County was bolder, opening polls that folks may go to 24/7 and permitting drive-thru voting. They despatched absentee poll functions to everybody who was registered to vote as an alternative of ready for a request from every voter who needed to do this.

They made it simpler to vote. The Republican lawmakers elected in 2020 got here to Austin with reform on their minds, impressed — like their counterparts elsewhere — by false claims of election tampering by a former president unwilling to just accept his reelection defeat. It put these Republican officeholders within the odd place of complaining a few Texas election the place their occasion did significantly properly.

They modified the regulation anyway, barring a lot of the Harris County pandemic responses and tightening voting and election legal guidelines in dozens of different massive and small methods.

That might be not how enterprise folks would run elections, however companies are customer-oriented. This is the Texas authorities.

Disclosure: KUT News and the Texas Secretary of State have been monetary supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partially by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Financial supporters play no position within the Tribune’s journalism. Find an entire record of them right here.