Texas elections are illegitimate according to EU standards, should they be treated as such?

When international election observers evaluate whether a country’s elections are legitimate, they don’t just check if votes get counted. They use frameworks like the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), which scores elections across 11 categories: electoral laws, procedures, boundary delimitation, voter registration, party registration, media coverage, campaign finance, voting process, vote count, results, and electoral authorities. Countries scoring below 40 out of 100 are considered failed democracies. Countries scoring 40–60 are classified as having significant democratic deficits requiring international attention.

Based on current data, if Texas were an EU member state evaluated using these standards, it would face Article 7 proceedings, which are the European Union’s formal mechanism for sanctioning member states that violate democratic principles. Article 7 allows the EU to suspend a country’s voting rights in European institutions and freeze billions in funding when a member state shows systematic threats to democracy, rule of law, or human rights. The process has two stages: first, a determination of “clear risk of serious breach” of EU values, and second, if violations continue, suspension of institutional privileges and financial penalties.

The EU has initiated Article 7 proceedings against Hungary (2018) for election manipulation, media control, and judicial independence violations, and against Poland (2017) for undermining judicial independence. Poland has faced daily fines of €1 million and lost access to €36 billion in EU recovery funds. Hungary has been excluded from key EU decision-making processes. These aren’t symbolic gestures. When the EU determines that a member state’s elections fail to meet democratic standards, it deploys election monitoring missions, issues public reports documenting failures, imposes financial penalties, and restricts that country’s ability to participate in shared governance. Texas operates an electoral system that would trigger these same mechanisms if international standards were applied.

Northern Illinois University ranked Texas as the most difficult state to vote in nationally. The state has closed 750 polling locations since 2013, more than any other state. Governor Abbott limited counties to a single ballot drop box location regardless of population, forcing Harris County (4.7 million residents across 1,777 square miles) to reduce from 12 locations to one. Voters without cars in Harris County face an average 88-minute round trip on public transit to reach that single location.

The state also banned 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, methods that had successfully increased turnout among voters in Harris County. Early voting hours were restricted to between 6am and 10pm. Over one million voters have been purged from rolls. The state operates under an R+15 gerrymander that makes competitive elections structurally impossible in most districts. Mail voting has declined 64% under restrictions that election officials openly acknowledge are designed to reduce Democratic turnout.

Attorney General Ken Paxton stated explicitly that his direct interventions to restrict voting in Harris County prevented enough Democratic votes to change the outcome of the 2020 election. The state’s chief law enforcement officer confessed on record that suppressing votes altered election results.

In a free and fair country, Texas AG Ken Paxton would be prosecuted for what he has done. Instead, Republicans laud him. It’s clear that Trump and Republicans hope that more AG’s follow his lead.

When you apply the EIP framework to these facts, Texas fails multiple categories decisively. Electoral laws score catastrophically low when the most restrictive voting laws in the nation are documented policy. Boundary delimitation fails when gerrymandering produces a 15-point structural advantage. Voter registration fails when purge rates exceed what any legitimate democratic system would tolerate. Voting process fails when polling place closures are concentrated in opposition strongholds. A county of nearly 5 million people operates with a single ballot drop box requiring an average 88-minute public transit trip, and mail ballot rejection rates spike to 19% in major urban counties

Texas would score reasonably well on vote count and results, the categories measuring whether votes cast are accurately tallied and properly certified. But international observers don’t give passing grades to elections just because the rigged system accurately counts the suppressed vote. They evaluate whether all eligible citizens have meaningful access to voting and whether institutional structures allow fair competition.

The comparison to international standards isn’t theoretical. North Carolina scored 58 out of 100 in 2016 before its voting restrictions were as severe as what Texas has implemented since. Hungary, widely recognized as Europe’s leading example of democratic backsliding, maintains elections that international observers classify as free but not fair because of systematic structural advantages for the ruling party. Texas has implemented more aggressive versions of the same tactics: gerrymandering that ends competition, media environments dominated by partisan actors, electoral laws designed to suppress opposition turnout, and officials who openly admit these restrictions change outcomes in their favor.

They don’t get to play the game and act as referee.

What separates Texas from Hungary in international perception is that nobody is monitoring Texas the way EU observers monitor Hungary. If the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent election observers to Texas using the same standards they apply to other OSCE participating states, their report would document systematic failures across multiple categories. The difference is jurisdiction, not legitimacy.

When Senate seats and Electoral College votes originate from states that would fail international election observer standards, what does that mean for federal institutional legitimacy? If Hungary’s elections are considered insufficiently democratic to meet EU standards, why would Texas’s elections be considered legitimate under any consistent framework?

The answer is that we don’t apply consistent frameworks. We accept election results from states that demonstrably receive a failing grade in democratic standards because admitting the alternative requires confronting an institutional crisis few want to acknowledge, since it would mean actually doing something about it.

But the facts don’t care about our comfort level. Texas has closed more polling places than any other state. Texas has the most restrictive voting laws in the nation. Texas operates under extreme gerrymandering. Texas’s chief law enforcement officer admitted on record that vote suppression changed election outcomes. When you score those facts using the same framework international observers use everywhere else, you get a number that would trigger international action in a developing nation.

So yes, Texas would fail international election observer standards based on documented evidence.

We have to ask, at what point can a state rig elections so aggressively that their results must be nullified?

Soft Secession Introduction

When federal elections fail international legitimacy standards, states have legitimate tools to resist. Get the Introduction to Soft Secession booklet at TheExistentialistRepublic.com for the framework detailing how we win this fight.

REFERENCES

Abbott, G. (2020, October 1). Proclamation by the Governor of the State of Texas [Executive Order GA-35]. Office of the Texas Governor.

Blank-Libra, J., Patton, L., Haq, S., & Winkler, C. (2021). Access to secure ballot drop-off locations in Texas. Findings. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.24080

Electoral Integrity Project. (2016). Perceptions of electoral integrity — US 2016 (PEI_US_1.0). https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/pei-us-2016

Leadership Conference Education Fund. (2019). Democracy diverted: Polling place closures and the right to vote. https://civilrights.org/democracy-diverted/

Norris, P., Martínez i Coma, F., Grömping, M., & Nai, A. (2014). Measuring electoral integrity around the world: A new dataset. PS: Political Science & Politics, 47(4), 789–798.

Office of the Texas Governor. (2024, August 26). Governor Abbott announces over 1 million ineligible voters removed from voter rolls [Press release].

OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. (2022). Hungary, parliamentary elections and referendum, 3 April 2022: ODIHR election observation mission final report. https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/523568

Paxton, K. (2021, June 4). [Audio podcast episode]. In S. Bannon (Host), Bannon’s War Room.

Rakich, N. (2022, January 11). Texas may have the worst gerrymander in the country. FiveThirtyEight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/texas-may-have-the-worst-gerrymander-in-the-country/

Schraufnagel, S., Pomante, M. J., II, & Li, Q. (2020). Cost of voting in the American States: 2020. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, 19(4), 503–509.

Texas Legislature. (2021). Senate Bill 1: Election Integrity Protection Act of 2021 (87th Legislature, 2nd Called Session).

Ura, A., & Cai, M. (2022, March 11). At least 18,000 Texas mail-in votes were rejected under new GOP voting rules. The Texas Tribune.