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The Austin City Council is slated today to formally vote to place eight city charter amendments on the November ballot. As council members debated those amendments at a July 28 budget meeting, District 7 Council Member Mike Siegel suggested that doing so could suppress voter turnout.
“If we add 12 more items to the ballot, this will increase the amount of time it will take for each person to vote and that will increase wait times at polling places,” Siegel. “There’s extensive research that shows that increasing lines at polling places actually functions as voter suppression. Basically, every minute we add to the ballot will inevitably reduce the number of people who vote” in Austin.
While several proposed charter amendments “sound good,” Siegel added, “I don’t see anything worth longer lines on election day.” He proposed that “we not put these (amendments) on the ballot” or at least prioritize “one or two,” which would be “significantly better than adding 12.”
Agreeing that it’s “a ridiculously long ballot,” District 4 Council Member Chito Vela said that the council should “be careful” about “how much longer we make it.” Vela added that it would be “even worse” to add a bunch of amendments to the 2028 presidential ballot “when we have the highest level of voter turnout and the longest lines.”
District 2 Council Member Vanessa Fuentes thanked Siegel, saying she would like to see research on “the correlation between voter suppression and the length of a ballot.”
Siegel’s office pointed to a 2020 report by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. It found that long wait times “can disenfranchise people who are unable to stay in line to cast a ballot” and “reduce voter participation in subsequent elections.”
His office also cited a 2026 report by Texas A&M University professor Chenoa Yorgason. It found that five to six additional ballot contests reduces “voter turnout by 1 percentage points, on average.” This disproportionately affects younger voters and those in lower-education areas, the report said.
“Ballot issues, especially lengthy propositions that are not easy to understand immediately, can slow down the voting process substantially,” University of Wisconsin Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden wrote Austin Free Press. By contrast, many voters select candidates based on party labels, he added. “Research finds that turnout and ballot roll off (where voters just fill in the top of the ballot) are affected less by the sheer number of contests on the ballot and more by whether those contests are about candidates or issues.”
Austin’s November ballot will include numerous federal, state and local candidates, including those for five city council seats. A Travis County Elections Division spokesperson told Austin Free Press that the Travis County Commissioners Court likely won’t provide it with a complete ballot until some five weeks before the November 3 Election.
The eight city charter amendments that the council is poised to approve for the November ballot today are significantly fewer than the 13 amendments that they initially pondered. But they’re more than Siegel’s target of two amendments — or fewer.
