Texans have not gotten any relief from some of the strictest vote-by-mail limits in the country, but now they will have the ability to cast ballots in person for almost three weeks ahead of the election.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday cited the complications of the coronavirus pandemic, which has surged in his state this month, in adding six days to the state's period for early voting.
The decision by the GOP governor was not a big surprise, because he'd lengthened early voting for this month's primary runoff and signaled he would do so for the fall. Nonetheless, it stands out because Republicans in charge in Austin have fought so many efforts by voting rights groups to broaden enfranchisement — and anything that could boost turnout is likely to benefit Democrats.
Starting Oct. 13 and ending the Friday before Election Day, there will now be 19 days to go to at least one place in all 254 counties to vote ahead of time, potentially permitting people not permitted to vote by mail — because they're younger than 65 and have no obvious illness or travel reason — to avoid long lines on Nov. 3.
The governor's proclamation also changes the state's status quo and allows absentee voters to avoid the vagaries of the Postal Service drop off their mail-in ballot to the early voting clerk's office prior to Election Day.
Texas has among the most restrictive mail-in voting rules of any state and last month the Supreme Court decided not to intervene in a Democratic Party lawsuit to expand voting by mail to all voters in the primary runoff. The party is pressing its efforts in lower federal courts in hopes of reversing the current state of play ahead of the general election.
Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia allow for in-person early voting but the number of days varies widely. Minnesotans are allowed to go to the polls 46 ahead of time, while a handful of states permit that for less than a week. At 19 days, the new Texas timetable is right at the national average, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
"By extending the early voting period and expanding the period in which mail-in ballots can be hand-delivered, Texans will have greater flexibility to cast their ballots, while at the same time protecting themselves and others from the coronavirus," Abbot said in a statement.
Abbott's decision "is exactly like his Covid-19 response: the bare minimum and not fully thought through," countered state Democratic Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa.
The state has the second-most electoral votes, 38, and five polls in the past month suggest former Vice President Joe Biden is essentially tied with President Trump, who won Texas last time by 9 points. No Democrat has carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but the rise of Latinos and white-collar suburbanites is pushing Texas from deep red toward an inevitable purple if not blue.
In addition to the presidential race, M.J. Hegar has a longshot chance at unseating GOP Sen. John Cornyn, a handful of suburban congressional seats held by the GOP are highly competitive and the Democrats even have a viable opportunity to win control of the state House
In another voting-related development in Texas, a new lawsuit was filed Friday challenging the state's vote-by-mail system, arguing it discriminates against people with disabilities.
The federal lawsuit points to Texas counties that currently offer electronic ballots for people in the military and overseas, arguing that the state already has the ability to offer more accessible ballots to persons with disabilities.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.