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</figure>Turning Red’s biggest offense may just be its unapologetic weirdness.
What makes a controversy? In the case of Turning Red, Pixar’s delightful new film about a Toronto teenager who discovers she can turn into a (huge) red panda, it seems no one can make up their minds. But the quest to pick an objection, any objection, to this quirky little movie might have conscripted Turning Red into larger ongoing conversations about parents, kids, and — deep sigh — the culture war.
The vast majority of the film’s audience seems to adore its main character, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl named Mei, with her proud fannish hobbies and her loyal geek squad friends. And they’ve been loudly celebrating Turning Red’s unique elements: Its early-2000s Toronto setting, its celebration of teenage girlhood, and especially its thoughtful depiction of a child grappling with complicated issues of family, community, and repressed history.
But the buzz around the movie in the days since its March 11 release has been tinged with drama, and might well give you the impression that Turning Red is Pixar’s most controversial film since — maybe ever. While that’s probably not true, the dust-ups around Turning Red keep gaining attention and going viral — maybe less because lots of people are mad than because the things a few people are mad about are just … kind of weird.
The controversies, such as they are, range from claims that this film isn’t relatable to insistent discomfort with the depiction of a young woman in puberty, a child having autonomy, and the very reality of — yes, sometimes cringeworthy — 13-year-old girls.
In many ways, Turning Red will be a deeply familiar story to many members of its audience. Its Toronto setting is full of local color and details to delight the natives. Mei is a boy-crazy fangirl who’s confident, passionate, and loves school. Those descriptors could easily fit millions of teen girls and adult women, but it’s rare, outside of Bob’s Burgers’ Tina Belcher, to see this kind of femininity lovingly, playfully depicted on screen. Mei’s favorite band, 4*Town, is a hilarious amalgamation of every early 2000s boy band, sporting all the nasally vocals, heavy synth, and drum pads you could want from a nostalgic trip down the backstreet. The film also sports cheeky period references, from Tamagotchi to Sailor Moon. Even more familiar to many more viewers might well be the film’s loving but strict parents, as well as the rich Chinese cultural signifiers on display, which have drawn praise from viewers:
I’ve seen Turning Red in a theater and now that I have, I’m really upset that most people aren’t going to experience it like this. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more seen by a film like this as an Asian Canadian in the Toronto area.
— Jaime Rebanal Does Not Have Elden Ring (@firewalkwjaime) March 9, 2022
Fantastic stuff.
The film centers around a careful metaphor that, like the movie’s other elements, is both specific and broad. In Mei’s household, her mother gives her freedom but keeps a close eye on her and expects her to help work in their family temple, which honors their ancestral love of the red panda. All is well until the onset of Mei’s puberty triggers a metamorphosis: Mei begins turning into an oversized red panda when she experiences intense emotions, and learns that this secret has, er, challenged the family for generations. The “cure,” so her mother describes it, is a ceremonial ritual that locks away all the inconvenient emotions associated with the panda transformation: aggression, anger, and fear, but also intense passion and happiness.
Many people are reading Turning Red as a narrative about intergenerational trauma. This can manifest as learned behaviors in response to oppression, abuse, or other challenges that are then passed down through the family or community — like Mei’s family inheritance — until they become embedded and difficult to interrogate. It’s also easy to see this narrative as a commentary on the way Asian diaspora children deal with the tremendous expectations they face to succeed — even in societies where they face discrimination and alienation, often silently.
Yet a metaphor like this one is also durable and applicable to all kinds of different experiences. From one angle, we do have a very individual story: a girl with a red panda spirit that her family’s ancestral temple has carefully locked away through a ritual involving a Chinese shaman and a blood moon. But from another angle, we have a deeply familiar story: a family forcing a child to completely repress a messy, unpalatable side of themselves that they were born with and don’t want to completely get rid of, even if they’re still learning how to navigate the world with it. That is an entirely recognizable story to millions of people. Just as Mei tells the audience: “We’ve all got a messy, loud, weird part of ourselves hidden away, and a lot of us never let it out.”
Whether Turning Red is relatable shouldn’t be a question. Except that the larger cultural debate around Turning Red was prescribed for us, completely predictably, by a single loud critical voice proclaiming that it isn’t.
The culprit: a review, since fully retracted but still archived, written by Sean O’Connell, the managing director of CinemaBlend. O’Connell felt that not only were Turning Red’s Toronto teens impossible for him to relate to, but that even trying “wore [him] out.” Pixar’s turn toward “deeply personal — though less universal — stories,” he feared, “risk[s] alienating audience members who can’t find a way into the story, beyond admiring the impressive animation.” O’Connell described the film’s target audience as “small and incredibly specific” and snarked that it hadn’t “bothered to include plot elements everyone could find engaging.” He also repeatedly dismissed Turning Red’s quirky plot as a giant Teen Wolf rip-off, which kind of implies O’Connell has only ever seen one teenage werewolf movie. In reality, director Domee Shi took much of her inspiration from classic ’90s anime.
The public backlash to O’Connell’s review was swift, and so fierce that O’Connell apologized and the website retracted the review and published a better one, with reviewer Sarah El-Mahmoud writing that Turning Red is “the most relatable Pixar film I’ve ever seen.” But despite El-Mahmoud’s opinion aligning with the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of the film, O’Connell’s review got all the attention. It made the question of whether Turning Red was too “specific” a central part of the public discussion.
Other complaints followed. Some viewers and critics have complained about the film’s supposedly inappropriate “maturity,” Mei’s willful nature, and the generalized problem of teen girls.
Actually haven’t heard of the movie but after seeing this tweet this morning I just came across this on FB. It’s got some people nice and mad! lol pic.twitter.com/nyjZdsEEUG
— I’m a Unicorn (@woopdedoo652) March 13, 2022
First, the “mature issues” argument — namely teen girls getting their periods. Turning Red is an obvious analogue for menstruation, and Mei’s mother mortifies her by presenting her with pads in public. But apart from this moment of public embarrassment, there’s little shame or confusion attached to the idea of getting periods, which is a giant win by itself — unless you’re the type of viewer who thinks, as Rotten Tomatoes audience reviewer “Jon K” did, that Pixar overstepped its bounds in a major way. “Insanely inappropriate,” he wrote. “Please leave the explanation of puberty to us parents and we’ll leave the family entertainment … to you.” Jeana O was “shocked for the huge emphasis on periods and sexual obsessiveness with boys (not something this audience is even thinking about right now and doesn’t need to be concerned about).”
Other reviewers echoed the sentiment that the film’s themes were inappropriate for children, but brought up a second concern: that it celebrates kids disobeying their parents. “It feels like the film champions kids being rude to their parents and other authority figures,” wrote Joseph A, while Cristy A argued that the film’s entire premise was suspect: “This ‘you’re perfect exactly as you are’ theme is not reality, it needs to be pushed back with love, we embrace our good qualities and learn from our bad, embracing anger, rage, disrespect and disobedience is not exactly the messages we want to send our kids.”
This idea — that Turning Red promotes disobedience and an unhealthy level of self- acceptance — has popped up so often in viewer reviews and discussion that it deserves a little unpacking. Pixar, of course, is no stranger to depictions of kids having rocky relationships with their parents, from Brave to Finding Nemo. Disobedient girls are Disney’s bread and butter, from Lilo & Stitch to Encanto to almost every Disney princess. It’s not clear why this particular Disney girl’s disobedience is so objectionable — if we graciously ignore the issue of racism, and the implication that some viewers want Mei to be presented as a respectful, obedient stereotype.
What is clear, however, is that Mei’s family approach to the panda inheritance clearly isn’t healthy for all of them. The conversation about disobedience largely ignores that the thing Mei disobeys is awful: Having her soul essentially ripped apart in a kind of exorcism that doubles as an emotionally scarring, possibly even physically painful intervention — even conversion therapy. If you’re a kid who’s faced with that kind of family pressure to give up a huge part of yourself, it’s arguably okay to feel a lot of negative emotions about it, and to refuse to go through with it. If obedience is going to give you lifelong trauma, sometimes you simply must disobey.
The conversation about disobedience is explicitly tied to Mei having autonomy over her own body, mental health, and spiritual nature, so it’s important to be blunt here: It’s Mei, not her family, not even her parents, who has the right to decide how she handles those things. And at 13, she’s arguably old enough to make such major choices, even if there is, currently, a huge wave of bigoted abuse disguised as legislation across the US arguing otherwise — legislation that attempts to deprive kids of their voice in exactly this kind of situation.
Okay, maybe not exactly this transform- into-a-big-red-panda situation. But Turning Red may be an unintentional litmus test in the larger culture war: How you react to the idea of kids practicing self-acceptance and defining their own identities may say much more about your methods of parenting than about a film whose climax includes a singalong led by an angel-winged boy band.
And that brings us to the final and most ridiculous strand of Turning Red discourse: The argument that the main character is annoying, unrealistic, or “cringe” for reasons I’ve yet to really determine. She’s loud? She likes boys? She’s … a typical teenage girl? It’s hard to understand what the specific complaints about Mei are, but the typical descriptors from negative audience reviews tend toward “obnoxious,” “silly,” “cringe,” and “unrealistic.”
So many people objected to these kinds of complaints about Mei and her friends that tweets like this one went viral over the weekend.
“turning red is cringe because 13 year old girls dont–” let me stop you right there when i was 13 i wrote a story about how legolas fell in love with me and how i went to middle earth and then aragorn also fell in love with me. we are cringe we are legion
— neon any prns! (@neon_heartbeat) March 13, 2022
The hashtag “#at13” also began trending, as people articulated just how over-the-top and embarrassing they were at 13, for anyone out there laboring under the mistaken impression that 13-year-olds are cool.
The idea that Turning Red is “controversial” is hard to stick with. The vast majority of audience members who love the film seem to love it deeply — and I have to admit, as a lifelong embarrassing fangirl, I found it to be completely charming.
In fact, it might be a sign of how special Turning Red is that it’s attracting the kind of criticisms that aren’t really controversies at all, but rather baffled, individualized emotional explosions in response to a film that disobeys the expected rules about what it’s supposed to be.
Mei and her friends are loving, unabashed fans who don’t have to overcome their dorky passions to find self-acceptance and social acceptance. Mei isn’t the “dutiful Asian child” stereotype, nor is her mother the overbearing “tiger mom.” Turning Red gives us a parental figure who doesn’t have an easy route to self-acceptance and doesn’t have all the answers, but who recognizes, in the end, that it’s more important to parent like a team leader than a tyrant.
Perhaps that’s the film’s real offense: It offers lessons for parents, as well as their children. How willing you are to listen might make all the difference in whether it leaves you embracing its idiosyncrasies or … turning red.
At the worst possible time.
The Ukraine war has been devastating enough for civilians in that country, but it also carries the seeds of a graver global threat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been rather explicitly threatening to escalate to using nuclear arms, particularly if Western countries get in his way.
President Joe Biden has sought to reassure Americans that a nuclear exchange is unlikely. He’s probably right. But the cost of such a war — we’re talking about a potential extinction-level event here, though the chances of outright extinction have declined somewhat as nuclear arsenals have shrunk — makes preventing it incredibly important, and means that even a seemingly small risk of nuclear war could be much, much too high. A recent simulation by Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security suggests a total of 34.1 million immediate deaths in the first hours of a US-Russia exchange.
Alan Robock, an environmental scientist who studies what a nuclear war could do to the climate, told my colleague Alex Ward in 2018 that the most devastating effects of a nuclear war would actually come from the smoke, dust, and particulates produced by the explosions, leading to a nuclear autumn or winter. In the worst-case scenario, Robock said, “almost everybody on the planet would die.” Even using very conservative estimates, nuclear war winds up looking like a major cause of death worth investing considerable resources to prevent.
So what are people — and in particular philanthropists outside of government — investing in to prevent nuclear war? Not that much, given the scale of the potential catastrophe — and in the midst of one of the most alarming nuclear crises in years, the total is shrinking. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the other high-profile issues like climate change,” Emma Belcher, president of the Ploughshares Fund, one of the few dedicated funders on nuclear issues, told me.
It wasn’t always this way. Foundations and other donors have played a central role in efforts to contain nuclear weapons since the dawn of the atomic age, supporting conferences of US and Soviet scientists starting in the 1950s, the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, and the dismantling of nukes in post-Soviet states in the 1990s. They helped make nuclear issues a major public topic of debate — in 1982, some 750,000 people demonstrated in Central Park for nuclear disarmament, part of a foundation-supported anti-nuclear war movement.
Despite that past success, funding nuclear war prevention has always been hard, and it remains so today. It’s hard to know whether specific efforts are succeeding, and thus hard for funders to know if their spending is effective. But given the scale of the problem, and its relative neglectedness, there’s a solid argument that philanthropists should get serious again about reducing the risk of a nuclear war.
Before we dig too deep into the particulars of how nuclear issues are funded, let’s address an obvious question: How, exactly, can philanthropic funding reduce the risk of nuclear war?
Sometimes, there’s a role for philanthropies and their grantees in providing actual, physical services. Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told me that NTI helped set up the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Low Enriched Uranium Bank in Kazakhstan. That’s a facility where non-nuclear powers can acquire uranium for nuclear power plants without being tempted to build their own enrichment facilities, which could be used to help produce weapons. A third of the facility’s funding came from NTI, which is in turn funded largely by foundations and individuals.
It’s a worthwhile program, but it is better suited to preventing nuclear terrorism or proliferation to non-nuclear states than it is to managing conflict between nuclear powers, like the US and Russia, that already have plenty of fissile material for bombs.
In heated political battles, like that over the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 or the ratification of the New START nuclear reduction treaty between the US and Russia in 2010, philanthropies can provide support by supporting advocacy targeting the public, Congress, and other stakeholders. Rose Gottemoeller, who was the Obama administration’s chief negotiator on the New START treaty, credits in her memoir foundation-funded advocacy groups with helping its ratification, writing that they “did important work to generate the campaign that began to inundate Senate offices with cards and letters.”
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Getty ImagesGoing further back, philanthropic support played a big role in supporting the nuclear disarmament and nuclear freeze movements during the Cold War. The famous Pugwash Conferences, which gathered American, Soviet/Russian, and scientists of other nationalities to discuss nuclear risks and press for disarmament, were named after the town of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, the hometown of their funder Cyrus Eaton.
Funders can also support “Track II” talks between former officials in different countries on nuclear issues. These officials often cycle back into their respective governments, and Track II talks allow them to build rapport and relationships with each other. They can also (as in the past cases of Iran and North Korea) open a channel to talk indirectly to regimes the US is not yet directly negotiating with.
NTI helps convene a group known as the Euro-Atlantic Security Leadership Group, which Rohlfing described to me as a “Track 1.5” process because it includes both current and ex-government officials. Experts from the US, Russia, Canada, and various European countries can discuss and develop proposals to reduce nuclear risk. In the wake of the Ukraine war, the group, which includes Putin’s former foreign minister Igor Ivanov, issued a statement urging a ceasefire to prevent nuclear escalation.
But the most basic function of funding is to develop expertise in think tanks, academia, and blends of the two (e.g., Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom) that can inform current policymakers and educate future policymakers. Robert Gallucci, the chief negotiator for the short-lived 1994 deal in which North Korea agreed not to develop nuclear weapons, and a key funder of nuclear groups as president of the MacArthur Foundation from 2009 to 2014, explained that one of his goals as a grantmaker was to train generations of scholars and practitioners who might influence or even write the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a congressionally mandated document released every few years that updates US nuclear policy.
At MacArthur, Gallucci recalls, “we picked schools like King’s College London, the JFK School, Princeton. … We were intent on growing the analysts and funding those kinds of programs so people would continue to talk about this, and we just wouldn’t get the old school writing the [Nuclear Posture Review].”
You can see some of the fruits of those efforts in the people tasked with overseeing nuclear policy, especially in Democratic administrations. Gottemoeller, one of Obama’s top nuclear staffers, came to the administration from the Carnegie Moscow Center, which relies on philanthropic support. Bonnie Jenkins, Biden’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, worked for years at the Harvard Project on Managing the Atom. Philanthropic support gave them space to learn and develop their views before (and after) government service.
Funding for all of the above exists — but it’s relatively modest.
The Peace and Security Funders Group, an organization of foundations and other philanthropic funders, estimates that in 2020 about $47.7 million in grants were made globally on nuclear issues, excluding those made by the US federal government (which gave about $80.2 million between the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies). $47.7 million might be an overestimate of the private contribution; it includes, for instance, funding going to the Nuclear Threat Initiative to work on biological risks like Covid-19, not just nuclear war.
When it comes to averting a threat with the potential to kill billions, $47.7 million a year just isn’t very much. And the pool is shrinking. Experts in the field told me there’s been a long decline in support since the end of the Cold War. Then, last year, the MacArthur Foundation (famous for its “genius grants”) announced that it was going to transition away from nuclear issues.
That decision hit the nuclear community like a punch in the gut. In 2018, before the change, 45 percent of all funding for nuclear issues came from MacArthur. That means funding could drop by nearly half with MacArthur’s ultimate exit in 2023. And this isn’t the first such shock the nuclear community has faced: The Hewlett Foundation poured $24.7 million into its Nuclear Security Initiative from 2007 to 2015 before exiting the field.
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The MacArthur announcement also came shortly after the nuclear research group N Square released a major report built out of interviews with 72 nuclear threat reduction practitioners in Washington, DC. Its conclusions were bracing. Interviewees described a field dominated by figures (mostly white men) toward the end of their working lives, where progress early in a practitioner’s career was difficult; where different organizations don’t work effectively with each other; where compensation lagged relative to other fields; and where an “intensely critical and sometimes biting culture” could feel toxic and push good people away.
“The fact that MacArthur decided to pull out of the field and that the N Square report came out around the same time was kind of a come-to-Jesus moment for the nukes field,” Alexandra Toma, executive director of Peace and Security Funders Group, told me.
MacArthur made its decision after it commissioned and released an 80-page evaluation of its programs from the consulting firm ORS Impact (which declined to comment for this article). MacArthur’s “Nuclear Challenges” strategy focused on reducing, or at least slowing, production of “weapons useable material” like highly enriched uranium and plutonium. The ORS Impact report recited a variety of positive outcomes from MacArthur’s investments, including advancing policy developments in the US government and keeping dialogue channels open.
Ultimately, though, the report concluded that MacArthur’s goals — including “progress toward the long-term outcome of a negotiated” agreement to cease production and eliminate stockpiles of fissile materials, and a “strengthened nuclear regime by 2025” — were not in reach. “A line of sight” toward those outcomes, the report concluded, “is not discernible.” Shortly after the report, MacArthur announced it would make $30 million in “capstone” grants to nuclear organizations before exiting the field entirely in 2023.
“In 2015, we began our Nuclear Challenges Big Bet with the goal to end production and eliminate the stockpiles of weapons-useable material,” the foundation’s Maria Speiser said in an email. “In this case, data from multiple sources, including grantees and experts, indicated that the Foundation’s investments and the opportunities afforded by the external landscape did not offer a line-of-sight to our ultimate Big Bet goal.”
While MacArthur has, as Inside Philanthropy’s Liz Longley notes, been funding nuclear programs since 1984, it reconceptualized a number of its programs in 2014 around the idea of “big bets,” which would be pursued through quick, big bursts of funding. The first two big bets announced in then-president Julia Stasch’s 2014 annual letter were “Climate Solutions” and “Safety and Justice Challenge” — the latter related to criminal justice in the US. The Nuclear Challenges bet was announced in 2016. In pivoting to this strategy, the foundation announced it was exiting a number of topics completely, including juvenile justice, housing, and population/reproductive health.
In the context of that strategy, it makes some sense that it would conclude one of those bets didn’t pay off and should be ended. Then again, the idea that the needle on nuclear safety could have been moved dramatically in the mere five years from the Nuclear Challenges bet announcement to its cancellation strikes me as absurd.
Reading the ORS Impact report on MacArthur, I found it … bizarre. It repeatedly seemed to blame the MacArthur strategy for not overcoming structural forces that one foundation could never overcome. “There has been degradation of treaties, agreements, and norms that are aligned with and uphold the nuclear regime,” the report notes — but at the same time, it notes that degradation is almost exclusively the result of the Trump administration’s decision to walk away from important nuclear agreements, like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and the Iran deal. MacArthur’s nuclear strategy may not have been perfect, but blaming the foundation for failing to avert the election of Donald Trump seems more than a little unfair.
Merely looking at the present nuclear policy regime and concluding it’s unsatisfactory, notes Gallucci, the former MacArthur president, is not sufficient analysis. You have to ask, as well, “what would happen if we hadn’t made the investment,” he says.
MacArthur is based in Chicago, Gallucci notes, and has been trying to lower the murder rate there for years. Murder is still high in Chicago — the number of homicides in 2021 hit the highest level in at least a quarter-century — but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for MacArthur to try to address the problem. Perhaps the murder rate would’ve been even worse without MacArthur’s investments. “The big foundations, I think, should be expected to take on big problems where you don’t see easy wins, when you don’t see opportunities to take credit for impact,” Gallucci concludes. Nuclear issues are a paradigmatic case. You don’t get credit for the nuclear war that doesn’t happen.
And interventions against nuclear war are inherently harder to evaluate than interventions against relatively common phenomena, like homicides in Chicago. The city saw 836 homicides in 2021, meaning it has a quantitative target, the murder rate, that policymakers and philanthropists can try to reduce. Too much focus on these stats can have unintended consequences, but at least there’s some guidepost for success.
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But absent any philanthropic intervention, the likely number of nuclear strikes in a given year is zero. With intervention, the likely number is zero. There just isn’t a quantitative indicator that can tell funders and grantees how well they’re doing, so inherently more subjective qualitative methods are necessary.
One option, Belcher of the Ploughshares Fund notes, is “process tracing”: “You can do interviews with government officials to determine what influences their thinking and where they got those ideas from.” This is imperfect (self-reports aren’t always reliable), but it does suggest that philanthropic investments can be productive.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Rohlfing gives the example of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, formerly known as “Nunn-Lugar” after its Senate sponsors, which provided funding to dismantle nuclear weapons in former Soviet states like Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The program “emerged from Carnegie Corporation funding of Harvard to do a study on looking at how to denuclearize the former nuclear states after the Soviet Union dissolved,” she recalled. It has been, she concludes, “perhaps the single most important investment in the reduction of thousands of nuclear weapons over the following several decades.”
So what comes next? One positive sign is the increased interest among donors affiliated with effective altruism in viewing nuclear war as an existential risk that could severely damage or even end human civilization. The Open Philanthropy Project and Good Ventures, which are largely funded by donors Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, have recently offered some funding for research into food production after a large-scale nuclear exchange, and into what a nuclear exchange would do to the climate.
Longview Philanthropy, an effective altruist-inspired grantmaking group in the UK, has also gotten engaged in nuclear issues. Carl Robichaud, a longtime nuclear grantmaker at the Carnegie Corporation, is currently an adviser to Longview and told me he’s joining full-time later this year. “I’m hopeful because what I see at Longview is a team that really understands the long-term importance of this issue as a potential catastrophic risk that affects everyone alive today, and the generations to come,” Robichaud told me.
It will be as hard for Open Philanthropy and Longview to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions as it has been for any nuclear funder since the weapons’ invention. And some suspicion is of course warranted when nuclear groups tell you they need more funding. They’re not neutral parties.
But the Ukraine conflict should underline the fact that the threat of nuclear war did not end with the Cold War. It remains very real, and escalates as US-Russian relations get worse. Some more funding to prevent a world war may not be the worst thing in the world.
Thousands of mail-in ballots were thrown out in the Texas primaries due to new ID requirements.
This story has been updated to include new Associated Press data and reporting.
You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.
Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.
And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.
“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”
But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.
Here’s what we saw in the primary and what it could mean for other states that have enacted or are considering similar laws.
The new law does a few things: It bans 24-hour and drive-through voting, prevents officials from mailing unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, requires monthly voter roll checks, and gives more latitude to poll watchers. It also adds a requirement that voters provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when applying for a mail-in ballot and write that same number on their mail-in ballot when sending it in.
Democrats and voting rights advocates were adamant that the new ID requirement for mail-in ballots introduced huge room for human error, and huge amounts of human error occurred. Some 27,000 mail-in ballots were initially flagged for rejection across 120 counties in the state. The secretary of state’s office has yet to publish statewide mail-in ballot rejection figures, but the AP data, collected from 187 of Texas’s 254 counties, found 22,898 were rejected.
The statewide rejection rate for mail-in ballots has typically been between 1 and 2 percent in past elections and was about 1 percent in the 2020 general election when mail-in voting rates were much higher. But in the 2022 primaries, county- level rejection rates ranged from 6 to 22 percent, according to data compiled by the Texas Civil Rights Project and shared with Vox.
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In four counties that reported the reason they had rejected mail-in ballots, those identification requirements were to blame over 90 percent of the time. In Harris County, which encompasses Houston and is the most populous county in the state, it was 99.6 percent.
This was foreseeable. Even some Republican officials were worried about mail-in ballot rejections ahead of the primary. Texas Secretary of State John Scott said during a February town hall that it was his “biggest concern” of this election cycle. In a statement Tuesday, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott, acknowledged the issues with mail-in ballots during the primaries and said his office is devoting a significant portion of its voter education efforts to the new ID requirements.
“We are confident we will have all the information we need to apply any lessons learned during the primary to an even more robust voter education campaign heading into the November general election,” Taylor said.
But others have continued to defend Senate Bill 1. Gov. Greg Abbott has blamed local election officials for misinterpreting the new law. And state Rep. Briscoe Cain, the law’s leading proponent, has argued that it had no adverse effect on the chaotic vote counting process in Harris County — if anything, he said it made it a “whole lot easier” to fire the county election administrator who oversaw it.
Voters whose mail-in ballots were flagged for rejection did have the opportunity to correct them to ensure that they were counted. But the process proved confusing and looked different depending on when the problem with a voter’s ID number was discovered.
“You can see all the different ways that this can go wrong. What if the ballot never gets back to the voter? Or they don’t see it and think it’s junk mail? Or they correct the number issue online but don’t realize they need to send the ballot back?” Slattery said.
For some voters, the process was just too arduous.
“A lot of voters get these letters of rejection, and they just don’t bother,” said Michele Valentino, a Democratic election judge in Dallas.
Some flaws can be expected when implementing a new system for the first time, but this bodes poorly considering how low turnout was relative to general elections: Fewer than 1 in 5 voters cast ballots in the primaries, which is higher than in the past six midterm primaries but still a lot lower than the roughly 46 percent of Texans who showed up for the last midterm general election in 2018.
“I can see this issue compounding and worsening as we reach the midterms this year,” said Jasleen Singh, counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she focuses on voting rights and elections. “That there’s even this much hardship that voters are encountering at this stage is incredibly concerning and dangerous for democracy.”
The AP analysis showed a higher rate of rejections in Democratic than Republican counties (15.1% to 9.1%). That was also predictable: Voters of color typically bear the biggest burden from any restrictions on voting, and they make up a large share of many of those Democratic-leaning counties.
But there are reasons for Republicans to be concerned too. Mail- in voting was already restricted primarily to people over age 65, people with disabilities, and college students. That means that the population of people who vote by mail in Texas has historically skewed older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative, and the new voting law isn’t likely to change that. Some smaller counties were not yet accounted for in the AP data.
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Sergio Flores/Getty Images
There are already staggering rates of mail-in ballot rejections in urban centers such as Harris County, and there are still a lot of rural counties in Texas that have yet to report their own rejection data, but it’s possible that the new ID requirements might end up hurting the constituents of the Republicans who wrote the law more so than others, Slattery said.
Florida and Georgia have already enacted similar bills, both passed by party-line votes, that impose new restrictions on mail-in voting. It’s part of Republicans’ national push to curtail access to mail-in voting and discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election, when many states expanded mail-in voting due to the pandemic.
Florida now requires voters who are requesting mail-in ballots to provide a driver’s license number, another non-driver identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their application. It doesn’t go as far as requiring that information to be written on the ballot itself, as Texas has. But Texas did reject thousands of mail-in ballot applications over its new ID requirements. Florida could encounter similar issues, though the state has a much bigger and more established mail-in voting operation that could make it easier for voters to adjust. Voting rights groups have sued over the law, and a federal judge is expected to rule in the case before the state’s primaries in August.
Georgia’s Senate Bill 202 similarly requires a voter to provide their driver’s license number or other ID number and date of birth when requesting a mail-in ballot and write that information on the mail-in ballot before sending it in. It has drawn legal challenges from the Biden administration and civil rights groups arguing that it makes it harder to vote for people of color and people with disabilities.
“What we’re seeing with [the Texas law], and I think with many of the laws passed last year, are these layering effects. In places where it was already harder to vote, it’s now even harder to vote,” Singh said.
Other states are still considering similar measures, and though the outcome of the Texas primaries should make them wary of doing so, Republicans pushing those bills haven’t shown any signs that they intend to reverse course.
According to the Brennan Center, at least 18 bills in five states would newly require voters to provide their Social Security number, driver’s license number, or voter record number when applying for a mail-in ballot. An Arizona bill would require voters to present an ID when returning a mail-in ballot and reduce the list of acceptable forms of voter ID to those that include a signature, a fingerprint, or a unique security code. And three bills in Missouri, New Jersey, and Washington propose new grounds for rejecting a mail-in ballot, including if the signature “does not appear to be valid,” though the New Jersey and Washington bills are unlikely to pass.
“These cookie-cutter laws that a national organization has drafted without close consultation with local election officials and that are jammed through without really serious and careful debate could end up blowing up,” Slattery said.
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With that, she strips to the waist, rolls the dice, and yells, “Come on, Southern girl needs new clothes!” As the dice bounce and come to a stop, she jumps up and down and squeals, “Yes! Yes! I won! I won!” She hugs each of the dealers, picks up her winnings, and her clothes, and quickly departs. The dealers stare at each other dumbfounded. Finally, one of them asks, “What did she roll?” The other answers, “I don’t know, I thought you were watching.”
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Still, the gentleman was too shy to speak to His Holiness.
Shortly after take- off, the Pope took a crossword puzzle out of his carry on bag and began penciling in the answers.
“This is fantastic!” the gentleman mused. “I’m really good at crosswords!”
It crossed his mind that if the Pope got stuck, he’d ask him for assistance.
Almost as if providence struck, the Pope turned to the man and said, “Excuse me, but do you know a four letter word referring to a woman that ends in ‘unt’?”
The three Cardinals behind, in front of and beside him shrunk down in their seats, as far as possible, all looking for something on the floor.
The gentleman was in morbid shock.
He couldn’t breathe.
He went within himself, thought deeper, longer for a plausible answer and after almost a minute, the dark clouds of evil parted in his mind and the sun shone in.
Turning to the Pope, the gentleman said with reverence and politeness, “I believe, Your Holiness, that you’re looking for the word, ‘aunt.’”
“Of course!” the Pope mused, not taking his gaze off the crossword. “You wouldn’t happen to have an eraser, would you?”
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He does this for several days, drinking one, and then the next one, and then the last one. After a week or two, the bartender says “You know, I can bring you your drinks one at a time, so they stay fresh and cold” “No, no” the Irishman says to the bartender “I have two brothers. One is on the oil rigs, the other is on the high seas. We made a deal that whenever we have a drink, we’ll all have three pints at once like this, so it’s like we’re still drinking together” “Thats actually really touching, Sir,” the bartender smiles and brings him his three drinks. For five months, he comes in every day and orders three pints, until one day he walked in and ordered two. The bartender was chilled, and got him his two beers. For the next couple of days, people would send flowers and cards as condolences. Finally, he comes in and orders two drinks, and he says to the bartender, “I don’t get it, man. People keep sending me cards and flowers. Did they invent a new holiday?” “Nono,” the bartender replied, “You’ve only been ordering two beers” “And? The Irishman sips one of his beers, confused.”Well who did we lose good sir," the bartender asked, “The lovely fellow on the rigs or the chap on the high seas?” “Neither,” the Irishman replied, “I told me wife I’d stop drinking”
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No, no. Wait. Here she comes. She just went to the bathroom.
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People would look over their shoulder, see that is was Donald Trump behind them, and leave the queue, so he would proceed closer and closer to the front.
As he was getting closer to the head of the queue, he asked one guy, who also looked and was about to walk away, “Wait a second, what is this queue for and why are you now leaving it?”
The man said “This is the queue for Canadian Immigration Visas, but if you are getting one, I don’t need one now.”
submitted by /u/Movie_Advance_101
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