Latest Republican assault on voting rights isn’t fooling anybody
Looking back at the 2020 elections, Harris County leaders — and voters — have a lot to be proud of.
Faced with a pandemic that fundamentally altered day-today life and threw the nation into disarray, we stepped up to the plate in a big way. Local leaders innovated in response to health and safety concerns, tripling the number of early voting sites in the country, creating 24-hour voting locations and introducing drive-through voting for the first time in state history.
Voters responded in kind, casting 1.6 million ballots in Harris County, up from the previous record of 1.3 million in the 2016 presidential election. The overall turnout rate was 68 percent. Not too shabby.
Sadly, Republican leaders didn’t consider this outburst of civic participation to be heartwarming. In fact, they seem to see it as a threat.
Gov. Greg Abbott in February listed “election integrity” as one of his emergency items for this year’s legislative session. And last week — in advance of the March 12 deadline for filing bills this year — Republicans unveiled a slew of proposals to that effect. The most sweeping, Senate Bill 7, was authored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes of Mineola and would bar many of the reforms Harris County adopted last year.
On Monday, at a press conference in Houston touting the proposed new restrictions on voting, Abbott explicitly acknowledged that the measure in question was prompted by the efforts of local officials such as former Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins, who served on an interim basis during the run-up to the election and after the retirement of Democrat Diane Trautman in May.
“Election officials should be working to stop potential mail ballot fraud, not facilitate it,” said Abbott, noting that Hollins had moved to send applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters in Harris County before the Texas Supreme Court put a kibosh on that plan.
Abbott was joined by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has long sounded the alarm about alleged voter fraud and similar hijinks in Harris County, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Deer Park Republican who serves as chair of the House Elections Committee and has authored several measures related to “election integrity” this session as well.
They are, at best, a solution in search of a problem. But to many Democrats, that would be a charitable way to look at it.
“Senate Bill 7 is a voter suppression bill, plain and simple,” said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis in a statement. “It pulls straight from the Jim Crow playbook, targeting communities of color to silence their voices.”
“Texas Senate Bill 7 isn’t about ‘election integrity,’” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. “It just makes it harder to vote. That’s it.”
Hidalgo also labeled the bill “a poll tax,” noting that it would require voters with disabilities from receiving accommodations unless they substantiate their disabilities via medical documentation — not an insignificant hurdle for Texans who lack health insurance.
Cain countered in a text message to me, “The integrity of our elections has been an issue raised by my constituents and other Texans since I first ran for office.”
Abbott also defended the renewed interest in restrictive legislation, which followed the best showing by a Democratic presidential candidate in Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
“The fact is, election fraud does occur,” Abbott said at the press conference, which was held at Bettencourt’s district office. “I know that in part because of my time as attorney general in Texas, when I did make arrests and engage in prosecutions of people across the state for election fraud. The current attorney general similarly has made arrests and prosecutions for voter fraud.”
Yeah, about that. Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton last year allocated nearly 22,000 staff hours to ferreting out voter fraud cases, according to a December review of records by the Houston Chronicle. His office was able to resolve a whopping 16 voter fraud cases as a result. All of them were in Harris County. None were elaborate conspiracies, or even resulted in jail time.
Given that there were 17 million registered voters in the state that year, more than 11 million of whom voted, taxpayers may well wonder whether this is an efficient use of the attorney general’s time. Of course, in light of the long-indicted Paxton’s ongoing legal travails — a nearly six-year-old securities fraud case that inexplicably hasn’t come to trial, an FBI probe into allegations that he abused his office — perhaps this kind of wild goose chase isn’t the worst way to keep him occupied.
Still, in light of the underwhelming results of Paxton’s dragnet, Texans may well wonder why lawmakers are bothering to file bills such as SB7, or the similar House Bill 6, filed by Cain, which seeks to preserve “the purity of the ballot box” — an infelicitous phrase that also appears in the Texas Constitution, adopted at the tail end of Reconstruction, in 1876.
Raw politics may be the answer. DonaldTrump carried Texas’s 38 electoral votes, winning by nearly 6 points statewide. But Joe Biden routed him in Harris County by more than 200,000 votes out of 1.64 million cast, or 13 percentage points. Realistically, the path to statewide glory for Texas Democrats most likely involves making some inroads in rural Texas. But it’s arithmetically conceivable that they could win the state simply by running up their margins in urban centers — and Republicans can’t ignore that possibility, because Texas turning blue is a doomsday scenario for the modern GOP.
What’s especially chilling about this new focus on “election integrity” by our Republican leaders is that it’s part of a nationwide trend.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, having worked on these issues for a long time,” said Sarah Walker of Secure Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to improve election integrity across the United States.
Hundreds of such bills have been filed in state legislatures across the country, she said — “a deluge.” Many of them, like the Texas bills pushed by Republicans, aim to restrict mail-in voting, which many Americans made use of during the pandemic.
“It’s very clearly and obviously a holdover from the ‘Big Lie’ that was propagated by Donald Trump,” Walker continued, referring to the former president’s repeated, thoroughly debunked assertions that he would have won a second term if not for widespread voter fraud in crucial battleground states. Trump actually lost the popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
There are, she noted, some meaningful steps that states could take that would help improve both the security of our elections and the confidence we have in them. One section of SB7, for example, would require the secretary of state to develop an online tool that would allow Texans who vote by mail to track the location and status of their ballot.
Perhaps Texans should hope that the bill in question is whittled and watered down during the course of the legislative process, so that it simply includes a few commonsense provisions such as that one rather than needlessly restricting access to the ballot box and creating a slew of new criminal offenses. Republicans such as Abbott might well be content with such an outcome, after all; they would still be able to go on Fox News and proclaim that their “election integrity” bill passed.
But what Texans should really hope for is that our state’s Republican leadership stop playing politics with our most fundamental right as citizens — even though we may use it to express our displeasure with them.