Groups say bill to allow recording of voters targets minorities
Civil rights groups are warning that Black and Hispanic voters will be disproportionately videotaped without their consent at polling locations under a bill on the fast track through the Texas Legislature.
Although videotaping in polling locations in Texas is prohibited, under a bill that passed the Texas Senate just after 2 a.m. Thursday, partisan poll watchers would be allowed to videotape any person voting that they suspect may be doing something unlawful. But poll workers and voters would be barred from recording the poll watchers.
History has shown this is likely going to lead to more Black and Hispanic people being recorded by white poll watchers who believe they are witnessing something suspicious, advocates warn.
“It’s designed to go after minority voters,” said Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas NAACP.
Not so, says state Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Mineola. He said the recordings by poll watchers will give officials a way to resolve disputes at polling locations especially related to potential voter fraud.
“They are the eyes and ears of the public, and if a dispute does arise about what happened, what was said, what was done, the more evidence we can have the better,” Hughes said of the provision within his Senate Bill 7, which includes a number of measures to restrict voting access in the name of preventing fraud.
But to Black and Hispanic leaders, the legislation is a replay of
the voter intimidation from the 1960s and 1970s. After the voting rights acts of the 1960s were passed, Domingo Garcia, the national president of LULAC, said law enforcement in some counties in Texas would take pictures of Hispanics and Black voters at polling places and then try to deliver those pictures to their white employers or others in the community to get them in trouble.
“It was a form of voter intimidation then, and that’s what this would be now,” Garcia said.
What makes SB 7 even more dangerous is who it is empowers to make recordings, Bledsoe said.
Poll watchers are volunteers chosen by candidates and parties to observe the election process. They do not undergo background checks and are not subject to any training requirements. However, state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, was able to get an amendment in the Hughes bill early Thursday that will require some basic election training for poll watchers.
As such, they could quickly become a sort of vigilante force, Bledsoe said. He said many times Republican poll watchers are sent from other parts of the community into Black and Hispanic precincts and may not even be familiar with the neighborhoods where they would be allowed to record people trying to vote.
“This is intimidating as all get out,” he said.
Shortly after midnight Thursday in a marathon hearing, Hughes amended the bill to bar poll watchers from posting the videos on social media or sharing them with others except for the Texas secretary of state.
But still, Democrats say the result is the same for minority voters. State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Laredo Democrat, said lawmakers heard from people of color during hearings who warned that “their privacy will be invaded by poll watchers who would videotape them not because of their actions, but because of the color of their skin.”
“Every minority member of the Texas Senate, all nine of us, believe that this bill will impact minorities negatively by making it more difficult for African Americans and Mexican Americans to vote, making it easier for them to be harassed by overzealous poll watchers and diminishing the likelihood that election outcomes will represent the preferences of We, The People,” Zaffirini said just after 2 a.m. while Democrats tried in vain to stop the legislation.
Activists say the legislation would violate the U.S. Constitution by infringing upon voters’ rights to cast secret ballots — if, for example, a poll watcher recorded the voter’s choices.
“That is clearly unconstitutional,” Bledsoe said.
But Hughes argued on the floor of the Senate before the bill passed that the legislation includes a clear prohibition against recording a voter’s ballot being filled out.
SB 7 cleared the Texas Senate by an 18-13 vote with all 13 Democrats opposing it. The legislation now moves to the Texas House, has its own bill with many of the same provisions. In order to become law, both chambers have to pass an identical bill and have it approved by Gov. Greg Abbott.
State Sen. Borris Miles, DHouston, said the whole bill is filled with attempts to suppress the vote in Black and other minority communities. Miles warned Hughes during the debate over the bill that many voters in predominately minority communities are going to take this as another attempt to make it harder for them to vote and that won’t go over well.
“I want to thank you sincerely, because what you’re doing here tonight is kicking a bear,” Miles told Hughes. “You’re waking a beast.”
Miles said in the current times when so many young people are marching for social justice and change, there will be a reaction.
“Please believe this: we’re not going to stand by on our generational watch and reverse our constitutional right and our civil rights,” Miles said.