Texas Republicans are launching a series of restrictive electoral bills, aimed especially at early voting, after Democrats enthusiastically adopted the practice last year.
More than two dozen electoral bills sponsored by the Republican Party are under consideration in the legislature as legislators seek to tighten voter lists and identity requirements, limit early voting and increase penalties for errors. Widespread interest – and a governor’s directive last month to prioritize electoral legislation – makes changes to Texas electoral law likely this year.
“Texas has been working on electoral integrity for a while,” said state senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who chairs the State Affairs Committee and introduced a comprehensive 27-page bill with several new restrictions and penalties.
“This was already underway, but then the 2020 election was in the national spotlight, and a lot of people have doubts, a lot of people have concerns,” he said. “I would say that has raised the profile of the issue.”
The electoral lie stolen from former President Donald Trump convinced 3 out of 4 Republicans that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election, according to a poll by Quinnipiac University in December, although there is ample evidence that it is extremely rare.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours looking for electoral fraud and found only 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 place, that doesn’t stop state lawmakers from joining their Republican peers across the country to propose new restrictive projects. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin – many of whom joined Trump to cast doubt on the system – are legislating to restrict voting, arguing that new measures are needed to restore confidence in the system.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, lawmakers have submitted at least 253 restrictive bills in 43 states.
Democrats in Texas – and across the country – contested proposals to expand access to voting, but with control of the Republican Party in most state legislatures and major undecided states, the restrictions are increasingly powerful.
“It is important that the system is fair, but it is equally important that people know that it is fair, so they will participate and 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 would directly address the creative ways in which Texans vote during the pandemic, such as early night voting and drive-thru voting, as well as postal voting, which Trump particularly protested.
“If you can name an improvement, there is a bill that is being introduced to try to eliminate it,” said Cinde Weatherby, who works on voting rights issues with the Texas League of Voters. The group opposes restrictive electoral laws and advocates the modernization of the state’s electoral system.
Early voting is a frequent target of Republican Party bills, with proposed legislation targeting where and when voters vote before election day.
Harris, the nation’s third largest county and home to Houston, appears to be a specific target. The county offered drive-thru early voting and early night voting last year for its 4.7 million residents to make voting during the pandemic safer and more accessible.
Two Senate bills propose to bar tents and garages for early voting, potentially targeting Harris County drive-thru early voting, which took place in tents and garages. Republicans sued repeatedly over the drive-thru vote last fall, but the courts refused to withdraw the more than 127,000 ballots that were launched this way.
Several bills seek to limit early voting to certain hours or standardize hours across the state, which would expand early voting in smaller counties, while limiting early voting in larger counties. Everyone would reduce voting time in democratic urban areas.
State Representative Jared Patterson, a Denton County Republican, introduced a bill to limit early voting to 6:00 am and 9:00 pm
“Mom always said that nothing good happens after midnight,” he wrote in a tweet. “That includes at the polling places.”
Another proposed legislation is aimed at postal voting, which lawmakers say needs additional precautions to prevent fraud.
Republicans proposed a bill that would shorten the period when voters could return ballots in the mail, while another bill asked voters to send photocopies of their driver’s licenses or other valid identification with their ballot papers.
Democratic voters in the state were more likely to vote by mail in the last election than Republicans, reported the Texas Tribune.
Several bills also seek to ensure that noncitizens remain outside the electoral roll and urge election officials to aggressively eliminate them. And a series of bills would add or increase penalties for fraud or errors made by voters or officials during elections.
Hughes’ electoral bill, which he hopes will be the vehicle for any voting legislation that leaves the Senate, would impose civil fines on local officials who fail to clean their electoral rolls quickly enough – $ 100 for each voter of the secretary of state. office state identifies as improperly in the books
Several of the bills appear to be aimed at preventing things that have happened elsewhere in the U.S.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Harris County, sponsored a bill that prohibits election officials from waiving signature correspondence requirements on postal ballots, which he said did not happen in Texas.
“We saw this in Atlanta, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee,” he said, pointing to many of the Democratic cities with large populations of black voters that Trump’s allies accused without base of orchestrating a large fraudulent election campaign to steal the election.
A court decision waived Pennsylvania’s signature correspondence requirements in electoral verification last year, but the other three cities checked voters who voted by mail. In Wisconsin, voters verified their identities by including copies of their photo IDs on the voting form, and witnesses were required to sign statements on that ballot. Georgia and Michigan also check mail signature for signature matches.
Pressed about it, Bettencourt said it didn’t matter.
“Just the fact that we saw that in Pennsylvania is certainly enough,” he said. “We just don’t want election officials to follow this path here.”