Republicans in the Texas Legislature are attempting to dismantle provisions that helped bring about record turnout in urban areas last November through bills that would reportedly make Texas—which right before the presidential election was deemed “the state with the most restrictive voting process”—an even more challenging place to cast a vote. Certain restrictions would only apply to counties with a population exceeding one million, according to the New York Times, and some aspects of the legislation directly target Harris County, the state’s biggest and a Democratic stronghold. The measures are among GOP-backed attempts in several states to restrict voting access in Democratic-leaning cities and densely populated areas such as Atlanta and Arizona’s Maricopa County, efforts that have “having far less of an impact on voting in rural areas that tend to lean Republican,” notes the New York Times.
On the single day that Harris County—where Houston is located—implemented 24-hour voting, more than 10,000 people reportedly showed up at the peak nighttime hours. Along with a ban on 24-hour voting, the two bills include a ban on drive-through voting, another flexible option introduced to residents this past election. One woman told the Times that the method “was a savior for me” as it provided a safer way to vote while eight-months pregnant during a pandemic, and avoided the logistical challenge of waiting in a long line while also taking care of her four-year-old. More than 127,000 voters used Harris County’s drive-through voting process in the general election. But even parts of the Republican bill that are not directly aimed at Harris County will most likely hit the area hardest, the Times reports, such as the call for a consistent number of voting machines in each precinct that “could hamper the ability to deploy extra machines in densely populated areas.”
“It’s about race,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, tweeted in response to the Times story. “And every time we use another descriptor ‘Democrat-run cities,’ ‘urban areas,’ we draw attention away from the fact that voter suppression is a fundamentally racist project.”
While “the next big voting rights fight is in Texas,” as Vox recently noted, GOP-controlled legislatures across the country are seizing on lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election to suppress the vote ahead of future contests. Georgia’s restrictive new law sparking national outrage and Arizona attempting to change the mail-in voting process in a now-stalled election bill are among such efforts. President Joe Biden won both of those states in November; Donald Trump got just over 52% of the vote in Texas, where, as the Times notes, there’s “a booming population that is growing more diverse.”
The majority of Harris County voters who used drive-through or 24-hour voting methods were people of color, according to a Texas Civil Rights Project study. “What is happening here in Texas is a warning shot to the rest of the country,” Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo told the Times. Some provisions, like attempting to limit mail voting access, are direct extensions of Trump’s unfounded fraud claims. Indeed, the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel last week found several Republican candidates in Texas failing to acknowledge that Biden beat Trump in a free and fair election.
In addition to GOP-backed attempts to limit voting, legal scholar Rick Hasen wrote that efforts to expand the legislature’s power over who counts votes and how they do so pose an equal, if not greater, threat to American elections and lays out a series of moves to combat such election interference, ranging from basic safeguards to the ultimate need to “create incentives for loyalty to the integrity of the democratic process, not to a political party.” Recent Republican attempts to undermine the fair conduction of elections and vote counting include the provision in the new Georgia law stripping the secretary of state of their decision-making power on the state election board, which Hasen notes is seemingly a direct response to Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state who refused to subvert the state’s results on Trump’s behalf, but also a change that will apply to his successor.
The bill in Texas likewise sets up opportunities to undermine election administration by giving poll watchers “the ability not only to observe but also to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity,” according to Hasen, who urges public figures and companies speaking out against voter suppression to sound similar alarm at such “election subversion” tactics. “The message needs to be that fair elections require not just voter access to the polls,” he writes, “but also procedures to ensure that the means of conducting the election are fair, auditable and verifiable by representatives of both political parties and nongovernmental organizations.”
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