Don't gloat over 53 percent turnout. Make voting normal

American-Statesman Editorial Board

Students participate in early voting Nov. 1 at Texas State University. Additional voting hours were added at the campus when a lawsuit was threatened against Hays County. [LYNDA M. GONZALEZ/AMERICAN-STATESMAN]

Thanks to a hotly contested U.S. Senate race and a polarizing president who energizes voters across the political spectrum, Texas just had exceptionally high voter turnout for a midterm election.

By that, we mean 52.7 percent of registered voters cast ballots, the highest turnout in a Texas midterm since 1970.

Sure, that’s better than Texas’ typical voter turnout, which regularly ranks among the worst in the nation. But really: Getting half the state’s voters to show up shouldn’t be the high water mark for a midterm election. And it shouldn’t take electrifying candidates to make such a thing happen.

Texas deserves — and would benefit from — a consistently engaged electorate, an idea especially worth pondering today as we honor the sacrifice of our military veterans in defending our freedoms. The formula for improving voter turnout is simple.

Make it easier for people to register to vote.

Make it easier for them to cast their ballots.

Give them the tools to understand and participate in their democracy.

Some Texas officials have balked on all three fronts, but we urge the new crop of lawmakers heading to Austin next legislative session to adopt policies that welcome more Texans to the voting booth. This shouldn’t be a controversial goal in a country founded on the bedrock idea that, as the Declaration of Independence reminds us, governments derive “their just powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

Other states have seen gains in voter turnout after making it possible for people to register online to vote (as 37 states do) and allowing people to cast an absentee ballot for any reason (as 27 states do).

If Texas had a robust online voter registration system like the one in Georgia, for instance, an additional 278,000 voters might have cast ballots in the 2016 election, according to projections by the liberal Center for American Progress.

The same study noted that states allowing any qualified voter to cast an absentee ballot saw voter participation in 2016 that was, on average, 10 percentage points higher than in other states like Texas, where only seniors, disabled people and those in jail or traveling out of town can vote absentee. It’s not hard to understand why: Mail-in ballots make elections accessible to people who can’t get away from work or find time between college classes to stand in line at a polling place.

Unfortunately, Gov. Greg Abbott last year vetoed a bill by state Rep. Celia Israel, D-Austin, to allow small communities to conduct runoff elections exclusively with mail-in ballots, depriving the state of an opportunity to develop a secure and efficient system to get more voters involved.

Studies show that people are most likely to become regular voters if they start early and stick with it through their 20s. Too many sit out, however, because of a cynical view about government that’s often rooted in a lack of civic knowledge: Consider that only a quarter of U.S. adults can name all three branches of the federal government, and a third of adults can’t even name one, a 2016 study found.

If Texas required high school students to take a semester-long voter education course, students could learn practical information about how and when to vote, how legislation is approved, how the system of checks and balances works, and how to research an issue and weigh the arguments around it. In a democracy, such knowledge is every bit as essential for successful adults as the career skills that high schools increasingly emphasize.

State Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston, proposed a bill last session for a voter education class, but the idea died in committee, as did another bill by Israel to create an online voter registration system. In fact, some of the Legislature’s most notable acts on voting access have served to undermine civic engagement, from the 2011 voter ID law that courts found discriminatory to shamefully gerrymandered districts that experts say are among the most skewed in the nation, leaving voters to feel like their ballot won't make a difference.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting a federal court ruling requiring the state to help people to register to vote online when renewing their driver’s license online, as the federal motor voter law requires.

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The Republican leaders who pushed for the voter ID law and against other voting access measures point to the potential for voter fraud, ignoring the studies showing such cases are very rare. The true peril to our representative form of government is that not enough Texans vote. That can produce elected bodies that don’t fully reflect the diversity, values and priorities of their constituents, potentially leading to laws and spending decisions that are out of step with the public's wishes and needs. Without a voice, the governed are merely subjects.

Those who want the American experiment to endure must ensure it has the most important ingredient: A population that votes.