It is pretty simple. Is your wife physically unable to enter the polling place (with or without assistance)? If the answer to this is no, then she can enter, vote, and both of you can be on your way. No affidavit needed since you wife is not in the class “VOTER UNABLE TO ENTER THE POLLING PLACE”, so the clause does not apply to you, your wife, or even your neighbor (unless, of course, your neighbor is unable to enter the polling place).
If she is incapable of entering the polling place without causing harm to herself and/or others, then she can still vote by having a ballot brought to her. In order to do that, you (or whoever transported her to the polling place) would have to sign an affidavit attesting to that fact. The only thing that would be illegal in that case would be if you knew full well that your wife was capable of entering the polling place, but signed it anyway. They can’t expect your wife to sign it, since she can’t enter the polling place, so you have to. It would appear that this is not to discourage you from transporting your wife to the polling place, but rather to discourage a relatively small number of people from disrupting the voting process by claiming they are unable to enter the polling place.
Does this reasoning make sense to you?
Now, if you would, can you explain how you can interpret
to mean that providing such transportation is illegal?
People have answered the question about why this proposed change does not, in fact, outlaw carpooling, and that seems satisfactory.
But I still don’t understand WHY this addition is being proposed
Why is the person doing the driving – who isn’t necessarily voting – required to provide this information? Why does it make a difference whether they are providing assistance “under this section or under both this section and Subchapter”? Will the driver even know what this means? Is this supposed to prevent voter fraud in some fashion? (Like prevent an actually able-bodied person from voting twice, once by going in in person and the other by having an officer deliver them a ballot in their car) Wouldn’t crossing their name off on the voter roll for that election serve the same purpose?
(d) On the voter’s request,*** a person accompanying the voter shall be permitted to select the voter’s ballot and deposit the ballot in the ballot box.***
I think it’s basically goofy legal writing trying to say that if you’re the person who drove the physically incapable person to the polling place, and you’re going to deposit their ballot in the box for them, then you have to sign an affidavit and give some personal information saying that person in the car is indeed in such bad shape that they can’t reasonably hobble in and do it themselves.
It’s not a question of the voter themselves, but of the helper. All I can think of is that by making someone sign and complete a form, that they’re unlikely to engage in any fraud related to the person they’re helping’s ballot.
While I have no experience with legal writing or election commissions, I have worked on writing engineering standards and specifications, which I suspect is similar. First, you will probably never find out the “Why?” as these things are written by committee and the number of reasons can easily be more than the number of people on the committee. The result you see is what the committee agreed upon. The committee is likely composed of equal number of Democrats as Republicans, and perhaps an independent or two just to spice things up.
You ask “Why is the person doing the driving…”. First, it does not say the person doing the driving, it says “the person providing the transportation”. It does not specify what “providing transportation” entails, but it does identify a person who has to fill out the affidavit. Without this, there is no procedural way for the election officer to know there is a voter who needs assistance (since the voter himself cannot do it).
Why is an affidavit necessary, you might ask? Well, this is a bureaucracy. There has to be evidence that the election was carried out fairly and equitably for the election to be considered valid. This cannot be accomplished if ballots are not controlled. With the affidavits on file, there is a record of the ballots that were handled under this section.
You mention this may be a method to reduce voter fraud. perhaps it would have that effect, but I suspect it would be a very minor effect as I would expect the number of ballots taken under this section to not be enough to affect the election results either way. But, by having these affidavits on file, the polling place has a record of how many of these cases they have to deal with so they can be staffed adequately (most of the staffing is volunteer, and planning is helpful when dealing with a volunteer workforce).
From my committee experience, I suspect these two clauses are a result of a “best practices” initiative (bureaucracies love “best practices”), as I have mentioned earlier. Without the added clauses, the election officer is responsible for handling this situation without any direction as to how to insure accountability, only that “The regular voting procedures may be modified by the election officer to the extent necessary to conduct voting under this section”. These clauses gives the election officer procedures to be used to conduct voting under the section, but if they are not fair or adequate, the election officer still has the authority to modify them.
One of the first rules I learned when working on committees is that if you cannot make a suggestion, you comment is likely to be considered irrelevant. That is, if you aren’t willing to help, don’t be surprised when nobody listens to you. Can you provide wording that you feel would be an improvement?
Being that I’m not on a committee, and this is a site for providing information, I view that last comment as irrelevant. I don’t know the past history of the legislation, nor what it’s supposed to do. Placing that request here looks like it might be an attempt to get guidance, but could also be viewed as a way to squelch further questioning.
Probably, if we can infer the purpose of the amendment to be the establishment of a clear procedure for documenting and accommodating requests for assistance for voters covered under the section. So, let’s assume that the goal is to define a process for creating a paper trail when someone comes into the polling place to ask an officer to bring out a ballot for another voter. The main thing is that I don’t see the value of the specific “transportation” language.
Why not:
(e) A person who requests assistance in providing a voter voting under this section with a ballot outside the polling place must complete and sign a form that:…
This phrasing would cover, for example, a scenario in which someone drives both a disabled person and a nursing aide to the polling place, and the nursing aide goes in to request assistance. The current phrasing is unnecessarily specific, and excludes this scenario, while also creating confusion about when and why a driver would need to fill out this form.
After seeing the discussion about the larger context, perhaps the only problem is that the new section is badly worded and likely to cause confusion.
It appears that, as shown here, persons who wish to help someone fill in a ballot will /only/ have to make a declaration if they also helped bring the person in. Presumably this is to catch only persons who help bring people to the ballot station? If so, that’s not a problem with the new section, it’s an intended consequence.
Welp, so far it appears to be a nothingberder. It’s being put in place by Republicans, though, so best practices would tend to suggest an abundance of caution. F’rinstance, Texas Democrats might want to keep an eye on these folks, just in case they add a requirement that the affidavit be notarized at the signatory’s expense, or something.