Texas Killed the Shortcut That Was Working Against Republican

Texas voters used to have a shortcut. Checking one box locked in the whole party's slate, and you never had to read another name on the ballot. It was fast, easy and convenient. Republicans killed that shortcut in 2017, during Donald Trump's first term as president.

House Bill 25 was quietly passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that year. Governor Greg Abbott signed it without the fanfare he usually reserves for culture-war victories. The straight-ticket option disappeared from Texas ballots starting in 2020. Rep. Ron Simmons, the Carrollton Republican who authored the bill, framed it as a civics lesson. Voters, he argued, ought to actually read the ballot and evaluate each race instead of blindly checking a box for their team.

Straight-ticket voting made up nearly 64 percent of all votes cast across Texas's ten largest counties in the 2016 election. And in those same counties, over four consecutive presidential cycles, Democrats consistently out-punched Republicans on the one-box option.

Democrats sued, but they lost the fight. A federal judge in Laredo briefly revived the practice in 2020, citing coronavirus and the misery of long polling lines, only for the Fifth Circuit to slap that ruling down within days. The appellate panel didn't quibble with the pandemic concerns so much as the timing, ruling that courts shouldn't rewrite election procedure days before people start voting.

The practical fallout has been messier than either party predicted. Longer ballots without a shortcut mean longer lines, and longer lines disproportionately punish voters in Black and Hispanic precincts, where wait times already ran higher before this change. Multiple studies on voter roll-off back this up, tracking the same pattern of delays county after county. Down-ballot Democratic incumbents took the harder hit, since they'd spent years riding a coattail effect they never actually earned.

Progress Texas's executive director admitted he was fairly indifferent to the whole fight, which says something about how unevenly this issue registered even among people who supposedly had a stake in it. Straight-ticket voting was still very much alive in Harris County in 2018, and former County Judge Ed Emmett blamed it, not his own campaign, for his defeat, after Harris County Democrats swept the ballot top to bottom and carried Lina Hidalgo past him.

Fifteen other states have abandoned straight-ticket voting over the past three decades, and only six still offer it: Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Michigan. Five of those lean Republican, which makes Texas's move look less like an outlier and more like part of a pattern. Michigan is the exception. Republicans killed straight-ticket voting there in 2016, and voters brought it back two years later.

None of this makes voting harder in any absolute sense. It makes voting slower, and it makes it demand more from people who already have less time to spend at a polling station.

Texans have no easy option. In November, voters will have over a dozen races to choose from, but none of them touch House Bill 25 directly. The law does exactly what Republicans intended it to do. It's a structural feature, and it's the reason a law justified as civic education has never once had to survive a vote from the people it governs.

Texas voters can bring a marked sample ballot or written notes into the voting booth to reference while voting. Voters are allowed to bring written materials into voting stations to assist them in casting their ballot, though that right does come with a caveat: the prohibition on electioneering within 100 feet of the polling place does apply to written materials, and election judges have discretion to determine if a voter is electioneering through the use of those materials.

The one hard restriction is on electronics. Texas doesn't allow cell phones or any wireless communication device inside the polling place, so a sample ballot pulled up on a phone won't work. Tt has to be a printed copy.

The real burden of HB25 falls on people who didn't know they could bring a cheat sheet, or didn't have one to bring. And even with a sample ballot in hand, people still struggle to fill in their actual ballot, matching a marked sheet to the right race while someone waits behind them in line.

Fair or not, straight-ticket voting was a shortcut earned through decades of long lines and longer ballots, and Texas took it away the moment that shortcut stopped benefiting the people in charge.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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