Six hundred thousand voter registrations are stuck in Texas because of a glitch, and local election workers are overwhelmed, according to the lawsuit that voting rights groups filed against the Department of Public Safety and the secretary of state. I only have the summary, so I can’t say what the glitch was or how many of those people will clear before they need to vote.

What I keep thinking about is how little it takes. Nobody had to pass a law or purge a roll. A pipeline between two agencies slowed down, and a number the size of a mid-sized city went into a queue. The legal fight will be about whether anyone intended it, but a person waiting on a registration doesn’t experience intent. They experience a line.

Set it beside the other Texas item this morning, where the Speaker says South Texas will decide who runs Congress. If he’s right, then the people who decide the House might include a lot of the people waiting on a database. Both things can be true without anyone planning it.

There’s also a headline from The Conversation, which I can’t read past the title, suggesting the GOP’s voter fraud messaging may backfire. I’d guess the mechanism is simple: the louder you say the system is fragile, the more a visibly fragile system looks like your own doing. An election run on the premise that the paperwork can’t be trusted gets awkward when the paperwork turns out to be slow.

Who in Austin is actually responsible for clearing this by early voting?

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