In March 2025, a federal judge struck down nine provisions of Texas Senate Bill 1 — the 2021 law that rewrote how Texans vote by mail — because they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The judge found the requirements were overly cumbersome and restrictive for voters with disabilities, including Texans over 65.

On August 12, the Fifth Circuit put all of it back, reversing the district court in its entirety.

Ken Paxton, the defendant in the case and now his party's nominee for U.S. Senate, called it a "major victory" on social media.

What just got restored

The Fifth Circuit's 11-page ruling reinstated, among other things:

• The ID-matching requirement. Texans applying for a mail ballot must write down a driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number — and it has to match whichever number the state happens to have on file for them. Not the number you have. The number they have.
• The ballot-curing process for fixing a defective ballot.
• Oath requirements for voters and for anyone assisting them, including disclosures about their relationship to the voter.

That last category matters more than it sounds. If you're blind, or you have a tremor, or you can't hold a pen, somebody has to help you vote. SB 1 wrapped that person in paperwork and legal exposure.

The Arc, the country's largest disability rights organization, called the ruling a setback and noted the obvious: more than 3 million eligible Texas voters have a disability. Shira Wakschlag, the group's senior executive officer for legal advocacy, put it plainly — "This decision is a huge setback for Texans with disabilities, making it harder for them to vote."

And the timing is not incidental. The barriers are back in place for the November 2026 midterms.

The number matching thing is not hypothetical

We already know what this rule does when it's switched on, because Texas ran the experiment in 2022.

A study of that year's primary — the first election held under SB 1 — found that roughly one in seven voters who requested a mail ballot had their application or their ballot rejected.

One in seven. Not for fraud. For a number mismatch — usually because the voter wrote down their license number when the state's file had their Social Security number, or vice versa. There was no way for the voter to know which one the state had.

The state's defenders point to a different figure, and it's in Judge Andrew Oldham's own opinion: rejections caused by ID-number errors dropped from 11% to 2.7% after the law's implementation, as counties and voters adapted.

Take that number at face value and it still indicts the law. 2.7% of mail ballots thrown out over a clerical mismatch is an enormous number of real people in a state the size of Texas — and the population most dependent on mail voting is exactly the population least able to absorb a rejection: seniors, the disabled, people who can't drive to a polling place to fix it.

The reasoning: nobody has standing to complain

The Fifth Circuit didn't rule that SB 1 is good law. Mostly, it ruled that the people harmed by it aren't allowed to say so. Oldham wrote:

"The bulk of the plaintiffs' claims fail for lack of standing. One fails on the merits. But none justifies interference with the State Legislature's efforts to prevent voter fraud and to protect election integrity."

Standing is the doctrine that decides who's permitted through the courthouse door. Disability rights groups brought a case saying a law makes it harder for disabled people to vote, a trial judge agreed after hearing the evidence, and an appeals court answered that they weren't the right plaintiffs.

Note also the framing in that final clause: "the State Legislature's efforts to prevent voter fraud." That's the premise the whole thing rests on — that Texas had a fraud problem worth this cost.

Paxton has been running this play for years

The man celebrating this ruling is the same attorney general who built a career hunting voter fraud — and who, according to a Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation, voted six times himself from a home he no longer lived in. A formal complaint about it would have been referred to his own office.

That's the whole shape of Paxton's voting-rights record. Enormous machinery aimed at ordinary voters; a shrug for himself.

Texas Republicans nominated him for the U.S. Senate anyway, on a record of scandals, indictments and abuse of office that was fully public at the time.

What it means in November

Every Texan who votes by mail this fall — every senior, every voter with a disability, every person who can't get to a polling place on a Tuesday — now has to guess which identification number the state has on file for them, and get it right the first time.

Paxton spent state resources defending that rule all the way to the Fifth Circuit. He won. He called it a major victory.

For whom?

Source

"Federal appeals court restores mail ballot ID requirement," Votebeat Texas and "Texas' mail ballot ID requirements restored by federal appeals court," The Texas Tribune, Aug. 12–13, 2026. Photo via The Texas Tribune.