Concessions unlikely on voting bill

GOP legislators: Quorum break can’t stop inevitable

Since Texas Republicans introduced their main elections bills in March, Democratic lawmakers have scored a handful of wins while trying to remove — or at least water down — the most controversial provisions.

The latest GOP proposals would no longer redistribute polling places away from Democratic areas of the state’s largest counties, authorize partisan poll watchers to record video and audio inside voting centers or allow judges to overturn elections with scant evidence of fraud, among other concessions.

But all those changes came well before more than 50 House Democrats embarked on their splashy quorum-busting trip to Washington, D.C., last month.

Republican lawmakers say they have little interest in cutting deals until their counterparts return to Austin, while giving no indication that they plan to remove any more contentious provisions from the elections bills. With Gov. Greg Abbott pledging to call repeated special sessions of the Legislature until the Democrats return, it seems inevitable that they will have to report to Austin and be voted down by a Republican majority that supports the legislation.

For now, Democrats appear to be pinning their hopes on a federal voting bill that would preempt or override parts of the Texas legislation. But any such proposal would run into the filibuster rule that allows Senate Republicans to block legislation they oppose, leaving Texas Democrats in the same spot as before the quorum break: all but powerless to stop an elections bill that remains loaded with changes they bitterly oppose.

Republicans in Austin say they have already negotiated plenty of changes, while pointing to a series of unforced errors — including recent news that two Democratic lawmakers may be on vacation in Europe instead of in Washington — that they say has left little incentive to compromise further.

“The whole fallacy with the last month is that there really is anything to be gained from a quorumbusting event, because it’s impossible to keep people out months and months at a time,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has helped craft the elections bills. “And when Republicans see people quorum busting from Portugal, that really stiffens everybody’s resolve not to have a discussion and reward bad behavior.”

The latest GOP elections bills would still create new vote-bymail ID requirements, add a raft of new criminal penalties to the state election code or stiffen existing ones, and expand the power of poll watchers — who are appointed by candidates and political parties — in a number of ways that Democrats say are calculated to intimidate voters of color.

The bills also still seek to quash the measures pioneered by Harris County during the 2020 election, with proposals to ban drive-thru voting, set new limits on early voting hours and prohibit election officials from sending vote-by-mail applications to people who did not request them.

While Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said Republicans are willing to hear Democrats’ suggestions for tweaking parts of the Senate bill, he described calls to remove bans on drive-thru and 24-hour voting as a “nonstarter.”

“At the end of the day, this bill is going to pass, pretty much in the form that it’s in,” Patrick said last month.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Mineola who authored the elections bill in the upper chamber, said he doesn’t plan to make any “significant changes” as he refiles the bill during a second special session, which began Saturday with another quorum bust because several dozen Democrats declined to show.

“As the bill stands now, I don’t have a long list of things that I plan to change, but I’m still listening,” Hughes said last week. “We want to get it right.”

State Rep. Andrew Murr, the Junction Republican who wrote the House elections bill, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Late changes feed distrust

During the spring legislative session, House Democrats said they contributed to the elections bill in the lower chamber and negotiated with Republicans in good faith. But they say they have little trust the process would play out that way again after Republicans made a number of controversial additions — without Democratic input — at the last minute as the measure was set for final votes in May.

With tensions still simmering after Democrats killed the measure through their first quorum bust, Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan “facilitated a meeting” between six Democrats and six Republicans to discuss the next elections bill that would be introduced during the special session, according to Phelan’s office.

“House Bill 3 as introduced incorporated some of the changes requested by Republican and Democrat members present in the meeting,” Phelan spokesman Enrique Marquez said.

House Democrats have noted that Republicans shot down all their amendments after a marathon hearing on the House elections bill, which took place days before they fled to Washington. The rejected amendments would have expanded the bill’s proposed window for early voting in large counties, reduced new criminal penalties for election workers who break the law and required a study about the effect of the bill on minority voters, among others.

Murr told Democrats he was “reluctant to accept amendments in committee” but was willing to discuss them on the House floor, according to Marquez.

“Democratic amendments were offered in committee with that understanding in mind,” Marquez said.

For now, Democrats and some election officials say the latest version of the bills would still create a number of new voting hurdles that they argue would do little to make elections more secure. (While some minor cases of election fraud have been identified, multiple academic studies, an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own “Election Fraud Unit” have yet to discover widespread fraud on the scale alleged by Texas Republicans who support the bills.)

“I think there’s been maybe this false narrative out there that, oh, the bills have gotten better because they’ve rolled back more of the extreme provisions,” Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria said. “The authors of the bill are trying to pitch this as, ‘Well look, we’ve expanded (voting) past the more extreme versions.’ This is still, no matter what, restrictions on law as it is now. And the most racist and restrictive provisions are still in the bill.”

Among the examples Longoria pointed to were the bans on drivethru and 24-hour voting offered by Harris County last year, both of which were used disproportionately by Black and brown voters, according to county election officials.

Not quite a win

Democrats appeared to win a concession last week, when U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon relayed a message from Republicans in Austin during a congressional hearing on the Texas voting bills.

Earlier, the testifying House Democrats had criticized a provision of the bill that would require voters to include their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers when applying to vote by mail. If the information didn’t match what the state had on file, the voter’s application would be rejected.

The Democrats said that would create a dilemma for the nearly 2 million Texas voters who used only one of the two numbers when registering to vote. Some may no longer remember which one is on file, they argued.

Fallon, a Republican from Sherman who previously served in both chambers of the Legislature, said his former colleagues had told him they planned to fix the issue.

“They are aware of it, they said they discussed it with y’all and they are going to cure it via an amendment,” he said.

It’s unclear who relayed that information to Fallon, whose office did not respond to a request for comment. The next day, Hughes said he planned to keep that provision in his legislation and was unaware of Fallon’s comments.

“We’re always going to be tweaking the details and making sure it works smoothly,” he said. “But of course, the bill will include voter ID for mail ballots.”

Phelan’s office declined to say whether the message to Fallon came from the House or to reveal whether the speaker supports amending the ID provision.

Cayla Harris contributed to this

report.