Voting rights groups in Texas have cut back on outreach efforts amid threat of criminal penalties

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ALAMO — Eustorgia Santos de Torres has lived here for four decades. Last year, she turned to a trusted Rio Grande Valley nonprofit for help navigating the citizenship application process. The same nonprofit — La Unión del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE — then helped her register to vote, and she cast her first ballot as a citizen in the primary election last March.

Santos de Torres, 67, is retired after years cleaning houses and working as a healthcare aide. She speaks mainly Spanish and is the primary caretaker for her husband, Nemorio, who is blind. “Yo soy sus ojos,” Santos de Torres said — I am his eyes.

But last month, Santos de Torres, a new voter, struggled to help Nemorio, an American-born citizen, understand and cast his mail ballot for the November election. All the information on the ballot is in English, she said, and the letters are small.

So Santos de Torres helped Nemorio to the car and made the familiar 7-minute drive to LUPE’s headquarters in the neighboring town of San Juan to ask for help with her husband’s ballot.

This time, though, LUPE workers reluctantly turned the couple away.

In 2021, Texas’ GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a sweeping and controversial overhaul of election laws known as SB1. Among other changes, SB1 made it illegal for anyone to receive compensation for helping voters fill in their ballots.

That not only makes it illegal for paid nonprofit staff to help voters, but also criminalized common past practices, such as organizations giving volunteers gas money or stipends. Violations are a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

In the wake of the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican currently running in the state’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race, investigated and prosecuted voting rights advocacy groups and organizers in heavily Latino communities across the state.

Groups such as LUPE say they have been forced to alter or stop some voter outreach as they worry about running afoul of the law. LUPE used to send workers out walking blocks to help voters. Now it has to instead ask volunteers to do more limited versions of that work.

Latinos and other non-English speaking voters will be key to the outcome of the state’s high-profile U.S. Senate and House races this year. But the law means such voters, as well as those who are disabled and elderly, have fewer options for help.

LUPE is known for providing one-on-one assistance to people in the Latino community, so the restrictions on helping with voting are a real pain point for the organization, Executive Director Tania Chavez Camacho said. Texas has strict rules limiting who is eligible to use mail ballots, but people over 65 may do so. LUPE helps around 30,000 people a year, she said, including people with disabilities and many older people who, each year, “want to vote by mail and they come in wanting help.”

Now, Chavez Camacho said, when the group holds public town halls for residents to instruct them on how to vote, if a voter pulls out their mail ballot to ask for help, organizers must ask the voter to leave so paid employees aren’t near the ballot.

And if workers for LUPE’s advocacy arm are canvassing for candidates and a voter shows them a mail ballot and asks for help filling it out, workers have been trained to say they can’t and walk away, Chavez Camacho said.

“We literally have to turn them away,” Chavez Camacho said. “We’ve had to do a lot of training with our staff for the past three years because they were so accustomed to helping folks one-on-one and now they can’t.”

Santos de Torres did what she could to help her husband, who mailed back his ballot about a month ago.

“But I don’t think it’s right that LUPE can’t help us,” she told a reporter in Spanish. “That law is not right. It’s excluding people who need help.”

“What if,” she added, “my husband didn’t have me?”

‘A person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own’

The Rio Grande Valley, where LUPE is based, covers roughly 4,300-square-miles across Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy counties along the Mexico border at Texas’ southern tip. It’s a diverse community with some residents who primarily speak Spanish. Younger generations of residents easily switch between English and Spanish in conversation.

Many households are made up of families whose members have mixed legal statuses, including some who have lived in the area for generations. The Valley also has a history of activism as the birthplace of the Texas farmworker movement of the 1960’s. Farmworkers – who harvested cotton, vegetables and fruits — organized and marched for roughly 400 miles from the Valley to Austin to demand fair wages and better working conditions. Mexican-American farmworker labor today remains key to the area’s growth and agricultural economy.

But due to the lack of affordable housing, Mexican Americans for years purchased land they could afford in rural areas outside of city limits, often lacking basic infrastructure and public services. Those communities are known now as the colonias.

Alamo, where Santos de Torres lives, and San Juan, where LUPE is based, are neighboring cities. The landscape varies depending on the side of town. In the southern parts of the cities, closer to the border with Mexico, modest residential homes with green front lawns adorn along palm tree-lined streets. Shopping centers, chain restaurants, stadiums, and commercial developments lie to the north of the cities, along Interstate Highway 2, reflecting the transition from the once primarily agricultural community to a growing metropolitan hub. The Valley has for years relied on its trade of goods and services with Mexico. It has a population of more than 1.4 million people and 90% of them are Hispanic or Latino, according to Census data.

About 24% of people in the Valley live below the poverty line, which is more than double the national rate. And about 30% of Valley residents don’t have health insurance – one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. The area also has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the country; Nemorio Torres’ blindness is a complication of the disease.

LUPE and other advocacy groups have long worked with residents in the colonias and all over the Valley, providing resources to find affordable housing and medical treatment, or helping with complex procedures such as filing taxes. Voter education and outreach was part of the mission.

Now, instead of providing one-on-one assistance, LUPE hosts group sessions with a screen projector showing what mail ballot applications and mail ballots look like. Facilitators point at the screen indicating what the instructions say and explaining how the forms should be filled out.

The limitations are frustrating, Chavez Camacho said, especially “si una persona no sabe leer” — if a person can’t read. “It doesn’t matter that we’re doing those sessions because a person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own and we can’t help them to know where to mark,” she said.

Instead, LUPE’s workers and volunteers now focus on letting people know key deadlines are coming up. They also have fewer volunteers willing to guide and interpret for voters at the polls, she said, because the law now requires such people to sign an oath affirming the voter is qualified to receive help because they are disabled or need an interpreter, and detail their relationship with the voter. They must also affirm they are not being paid by a candidate or political committee, which would be illegal. Volunteers fear any misstep while assisting voters could get them in trouble, Chavez-Camacho said.

“We really feel that the people are not getting the support they need,” Chavez Camacho said.

Election and voting law experts say the courts have interpreted “compensation” prohibited from going to volunteers by SB1 as any type of benefit. That interpretation is so broad that it makes it difficult for voter outreach organizations to know whether they are violating the law, said Zachary Dolling, litigation director at Texas Civil Rights Project, which works with groups to design trainings in voter outreach that comply with the law.

Dolling said some organizations historically provided unpaid volunteers dinner, T-shirts, or pens, and others have given volunteers college credit for their work.

“All of those things are items of value” and could be considered compensation, he said.

Advocates warned state leaders of added burdens for people with disabilities

Texas Republicans passed SB1, the sweeping overhaul of election law, in part responding to false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Republicans claimed the law would increase public trust and confidence in the elections. Democrats argued the legislation would disproportionately burden voters of color and people with disabilities, and staged two walkouts and a 15-hour Senate filibuster in their failed attempt to defeat the bill.

Despite lawsuits from voting rights organizations including LUPE, the League of United Latin American Citizens and organizations representing Texans with disabilities, a federal appeals court ultimately upheld key provisions of SB1, including the restrictions on voter assistance. Other attempts to expand voting help for people with disabilities were meanwhile unsuccessful.

In 2023, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded vote-by-mail access for people with disabilities — specifically people who are blind or paralyzed and need assistance marking their ballot — by allowing such voters to request an electronic ballot and use a computer to mark their choices. Similar options in Texas are already available for military overseas voters and astronauts, but not for voters with disabilities.

The challenges Santos de Torres and her husband have faced are an example of what advocates worried about under SB1, said Lydia Nunez Landry, statewide coordinator for REV UP Texas, which works to get out the vote among people with disabilities.

“That was our worst fear and now it’s happening,” she said. Nunez Landry has muscular dystrophy, uses a power wheelchair, and needs help doing basic tasks such as opening the refrigerator.

The state has made voting “just so impossible and so arduous for people — and now people are also terrified of helping us,” she said.

An increased ‘sense of anxiety’

Groups across the state have been changing their voter outreach work to comply with SB1.

Asian Texans for Justice conducts voter outreach in Asian communities, focusing on San Antonio, Houston, Austin, and North Texas.

The stricter rules associated with voting by mail under SB1 have created “a sense of anxiety” in those communities, Executive Director Nabila Mansoor said. She said that the process is now much more complicated for elderly voters, who must provide one of two forms of ID on their application and pay close attention to pages of instructions that are written in font that is small and hard for them to read. In addition, an error could force them to restart the whole process of applying for a ballot.

“That anxiety comes from this kind of fear that they’re going to do something wrong,” Mansoor said. “Whenever you have that kind of fear, it is one more barrier for that person to actually go out and vote.”

Now that Asian Texans for Justice can no longer provide one-on-one help, they’ve turned to providing checklists for voters, she said, which she believes is less effective when some voters may need help reading and understanding the ballot and instructions

Mansoor said she believes that SB1’s goal was to make it harder for people to vote.

“It means that we have to be more careful. It means that we have to dot our i’s and cross our t’s. It means that we have to take good records. It means that we have to be very thorough in terms of our training of our volunteers,” she said, adding that the organization assembled a legal team to defend against challenges to their work as well.

In the meantime, volunteers for LUPE and other groups say they are doing their best to fill the gap.

Maria Gomez, better known as Doña Mary, of Pharr, worked as a farmworker for years in Hidalgo County and has been a member of LUPE since the organization was founded. Gomez, 78, was involved in the farmworker movement years ago. She now ensures her elderly friends and neighbors are aware of election deadlines, know where to vote, and have a ride to the polls if they need one.

After she drops off her grandkids and great-grandkids at school, she makes her rounds around the Colonias in San Juan in her small red SUV. She chats up her neighbors, and asks them what they need help with or if they need resources or a ride. She’s always fielding calls.

“People don’t vote because sometimes they can’t leave their home and because they might not have access to that piece of paper that they need to sign to receive their ballot,” Gomez said in Spanish, referring to voter registration forms and ballot-by-mail applications.

One of her friends, 80-year-old Teresa Corona Garza of San Juan, has relied on Gomez for rides to the polls for some time now. Corona Garza struggles to stand for long periods of time and can’t see very well out of her left eye. Even though she qualifies to vote by mail, she prefers to go to the polls in person.

“There’s so much on there you have to fill out, and those letters are small,” Corona Garza said in Spanish. “No, I prefer to go, quiero ver que mi voto cuenta,” she said – I want to see that my vote is counted.

The laws have gotten so complicated and strict that Gomez worries state leaders may even try to prevent volunteers like her from providing rides to the polls.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, if they’re going to keep making this harder for people,” she said, “but I would like to see people who want to vote to be able to do it.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at [email protected].