Republicans in Texas are enacting a string of restricted election bills, and they are particularly aimed at voting early after Democrats enthusiastically accepted the practice last year.
More than two dozen IDP-sponsored election bills are being considered in the legislature, as lawmakers want to tighten ID requirements and voter lists, limit early voting and increase penalties for errors. The widespread interest – and an order from the governor last month to prioritize election legislation – is likely to make changes to Texas’ election law this year.
“Texas has been working on electoral integrity for a while,” said State Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who chairs the State Committee, and introduced a 27-page omnibus bill with several new restrictions and fines.
“It was already in process, but then the election in 2020 was so in the national spotlight, and so many people have questions, so many people are worried,” he said. “I would say it raised the issue of the case.”
Former President Donald Trump’s stolen election lie has convinced three out of four Republicans that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election, according to a poll by Quinnipiac University in December, although there is broad evidence that it is extremely rare.
The Texas Attorney General’s office, Ken Paxton, spent 22,000 hours searching for fraud and only discovered 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms, according to The Houston Chronicle. Nearly 17 million voters are registered in Texas.
And while Texas already has some of the most restrictive laws in the books, it prevents state lawmakers from joining their GOP counterparts across the country to propose new restrictive bills. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin – many of whom were with Trump to question the system – passed legislation to curb the vote, arguing that new measures are needed to restore confidence in the system.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, lawmakers in 43 states have introduced at least 253 restrictive bills.
Democrats in Texas – and across the state – have opposed proposals to expand voting access to the vote, but with GOP control in a majority of state legislatures and in key swing states, the restrictions are becoming increasingly powerful.
“It’s important that the system is fair, but it’s just as important that people know it’s fair, so that they will participate, so that they will vote,” said Hughes, who was re-elected in November. He said he was not sure if the presidential race had been stolen.
Many of the provisions will address direct attention to creative ways in which Texans voted during the pandemic, such as early voting overnight and driving through voting, as well as voting post, to which Trump particularly protested.
“If you can name an improvement, there is a bill that has been introduced to try to eliminate it,” Cinde Weatherby said. She works on voting rights issues at the League of Women Voters Texas. The group is against limited voting laws and advocates for the modernization of the state’s electoral system.
Early voting is a regular target of the IDP bills, with proposed legislation focusing on where and when voters vote before election day.
Harris, the country’s third largest state and home to Houston, appears to be a specific target. The province hosted early voting last year and earlier in the night voted for its 4.7 million residents to make it safer and more accessible during the pandemic.
Two Senate bills suggest excluding tents and garages for early voting, possibly aimed at the early Harris County vote, which took place in tents and garages. Republicans repeatedly sued last fall over drive-through voting, but the courts refused to throw out the more than 127,000 ballots cast in this way.
Several bills seek to limit early voting to certain hours or to standardize hours across the state, which will extend early voting in smaller provinces while limiting it in the larger provinces. All would reduce the early voting walls in urban, democratic areas.
State Representative Jared Patterson, a Republican from Denton County, introduced a bill to limit early voting to 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
“Momma always said nothing good happens after midnight,” he wrote in a tweet. “It also includes polling stations.”
Other proposed legislation is aimed at postal voting, which legislators say requires additional precautions to prevent fraud.
Republicans proposed a bill that would reduce the period during which voters could return the postal letters, while another bill would ask voters to return photocopies of their driver’s licenses or other qualifying identification with their postal votes.
Democratic voters in the state were more likely to vote in the last election than Republicans, reports The Texas Tribune.
Several bills also seek to ensure that non-citizens stay off the electoral roll and urge election officials to aggressively purge the roles. And a lot of bills will add or increase fines for fraud or mistakes made by voters or officials during the election.
Hughes’ election bill, which he said would be the vehicle for any Senate ballot, would impose civil fines on local officials who do not clean up their constituents quickly enough – $ 100 for each voter the Secretary of State identify as incorrect in the books.
Several of the bills appear to be aimed at preventing things from happening elsewhere in the US
State Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican, has sponsored a bill banning election officials from waiving the signature requirements for postal votes, which he said did not happen in Texas.
“We’ve seen it in Atlanta, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee,” he said, pointing to many of the Democratic cities with a large population of black voters that Trump’s allies are baselessly accused of organizing a major voter fraud campaign. has to steal the election.
A court ruling last year overturned Pennsylvania’s signature requirements regarding ballot box verification, but the other three cities confirmed voters who cast ballots. In Wisconsin, voters verified their identities by including copies of their photo IDs in the ballot paper, and witnesses had to sign affidavits on the ballot paper. Georgia and Michigan also verify signature contests on ballot papers.
At that, Bettencourt said it did not matter.
“Just the fact that we saw it for sure in Pennsylvania is enough,” he said. “We just do not want election officials to go down this road.”