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Notes -
I'm assuming the discussion over red state efforts to crack down on voter fraud are sufficiently far downthread to justify another top level comment:
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2022/10/19/435531/texas-agencies-plan-to-monitor-harris-county-elections-raises-concerns-among-observers/
TLDR is that Texas government agencies are sending their own teams of pollwatchers, inspectors, and legal advisors to Harris county(Houston metro area) to monitor the conduct of the election. This is only the latest round in an ongoing saga of escalating tensions between the Harris county and state governments, the previous episode of which- a controversy over property taxes and policing- is fascinating in its own right.
My priors, like with other red state election security measures, is that it will spend some amount of money to accomplish precisely nothing, but it will give Beto O'Rourke and Rochelle Garza ammunition to claim voter suppression/vote rigging if they underperform in Harris county(which is likely; Harris county is probably the lightest shade of blue of Texas's blue counties and also has an unpopular dem county judge running for reelection). It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan, the line between the Texas GOP and Texas governor being much thinner in the case of the secretary of state(a political appointment in a one party state) and Ken Paxton's office, but the Texas government has historically not taken large risks they weren't 100% sure they could get away with and even if Abbott and Paxton were able to flip votes, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to do so without it being widely known, and in any case they both have a single digit chance of losing which gives them almost no upside to pulling stunts like that.
It will accomplish exactly as much as courts allow it to. Anecdotally, I've never cast an in-person vote in a blue city wherein voting procedures were followed. This is 3 major cities in the midwest, east, and southeast. What this amounts to is that, if judges follow the law, pretty much every vote coming out of Dem cities can be thrown out.
What will actually happen is left to the readers' imagination.
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I've never had ID checked in a mandatory ID state (4x), never had my signature be rejected in a non-ID state (3x) even when I just scribble nonsense. Electioneering is regularly allowed right outside of and in the polling place, despite laws against this. Ballot control is non-existent, boxes are just stacked around and rarely sealed. Same day registrants are frequently brought in en masse and registered without the statutorily required amount of documentation. Students are registered on campus without fulfilling the mandatory residency requirements.
Counter-anecdote as long as we're at it - I've had my ID checked every time I've voted in deep blue Madison, Wisconsin since I moved here awhile back. The local politics are ridiculous in many ways, but people do basically follow rules.
I've not been back to Madison in a long time, but last I went it was much more of a Suburb/Exurb vibe than actually a city. I'd expect their polling places are staffed largely by the same sort of old women as in my parents' hometown. I'd also expect it to look orderly and everyone to queue. If you aren't seeing a "fellow voter" who you suspect peed on themselves recently or is actively high on something other than marijuana you aren't really getting the real urban experience.
Although, being a college town, I'd expect Madison to have quite a bit of registration fraud.
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