I prefer to spend my finite mental and emotional energy writing code because I get a new piece of technology when I’m done. A piece of technology that doesn’t ask questions and does what it’s supposed to do. But when I saw the technology I love being used as a tool of voter suppression I knew I had to speak on it.

I’m voting in Harris County this year and Texas has extraordinarily strict voter ID laws. There have been numerous legislative and judicial attempts to block them because they impact minorities disproportionately. But like Big Tex, they still stand.

In my opinion, Texas is suppressing voters far more effectively through their website and the use of QR Code technology. And they’re getting away with it. Last month I was a bit concerned because I couldn’t remember if I had registered to vote when I renewed my driver’s license. So I visited the Texas Elections website.

The first thing I noticed is that it asked me to log in which was already stressing me out. I knew I didn’t have a login. But upon closer inspection, no login was required at all. It was just a drop-down. Strike One. They’re counting on people to give up here.

The drop-down gave me three options to find my registration. I could use my voter unique identifier (VUID) number. Obviously, I had no idea what that was. I could also look it up using my TDL number. I assumed TDL meant Texas Driver’s License. But I didn’t know because there were no explanations anywhere. Strike Two.

The last option was to use my name, date of birth and address. I put that in and it finally showed my registration. But it didn’t tell me my polling location. I had to go to a totally separate website (Harris County Clerk’s Office) to get that information. I typed everything in as it asked but it kept saying “No Records Found.” Did I mention that by this time I had found my valid voter registration card?

I tried another 5 or 6 times and it occurred to me that there was an issue with the postal abbreviation. For example, typing “Lane” or “ln” didn’t work. But typing “Ln” did. You’ve probably heard about the ‘Exact Match’ registration requirement in Georgia. But this wasn’t about an exact match to what I wrote on my application. This was requiring an exact match to an arbitrary default value on a web browser.

Strike Three and Texas is Out.

Who wouldn’t walk away after dealing with all of this?

Another thing is that my polling location wasn’t listed on my voter registration card. It simply said Houston ISD (Independent School District) which is the size of a city itself. My actual location ended up being a recreation center.

Texas is huge. Houston is huge. I’ve worked for city governments and school districts before so I was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just didn’t have it together yet.

But here’s the thing. There was a QR Code on the card that said: “Scan here to find your Polling Location!” So they knew what my polling location was from the jump. That QR Code had to have all my data embedded into it in order to work. Why make a puzzle or a game out of me finding out? Knowing the amount of work it took to create the code and the database, it would have been much easier to simply print the location on the card. But that’s only if they wanted everybody to vote.

Putting this QR Code on the card says:

A: You must own a smartphone in order to get your polling location.

B: You must know how to download a QR Scanner app to find your polling location.

To me, this is a form of voter suppression, not to mention the fact that the Harris County Clerk website repeatedly said I wasn’t even registered to vote.

I recently did a Google search in Chrome on a desktop and the top hit was from a group called Democracy Works. It has an input field where you can type in your address and find your nearest polling location. If a private organization can do this, why can’t Texas and Harris County?

You see Texas is all about money. Their economy is bigger than Russia’s. They want to keep it that way. I think that any group of people that goes against the status quo will be suppressed. Suppression along the technology divide impacts people on both racial and socioeconomic levels. Let’s not allow technology to be misused in this way.

Kelle Stewart

Writing since November 2018 · 1 story contributed