Partnership fails
Region’s biggest business group refuses to take a stand on voter suppression measures.
What does it mean to be the most diverse city in America if we are still so divided — by poverty, by access to quality schools, by politics — and now, even by our disparate views on whether voting rights are worth fighting for?
While a coalition of major companies, business executives and local elected leaders have stood up against the latest plot by Texas lawmakers to whittle down voting access, the Houston region’s biggest business group, the Greater Houston Partnership, has taken a stand by refusing to take a stand.
A breakaway group of 10 members wrote GHP President Bob Harvey and the board chair, Amy Chronis, urging them to oppose Senate Bill 7 and House Bill 6 and advocate for improvements: “New election legislation in Texas should expand, instead of limit, options for civic participation,” they wrote.
Expanded voting is the very thing Republican leaders are trying to prevent in our young, increasingly urban and diverse Lone Star State. Despite their claims, the bills do little to enhance election security.
The bills, one of which will be debated Thursday in the House, limit polling hours, make it easier to purge voting rolls, ban drive-thru voting and allow partisan poll watchers to play Big Brother by recording video. One provision in the Senate bill may lead to polling sites in Houston’s Black and Latino communities being relocated to outlying areas where more white voters live.
Yet, the partnership, which should be championing voter participation in our city and fighting for our region’s rightful political power in this state, has made an equivocating call for “balance.” The organization that has in the past marshaled its considerable influence to thwart antitransgender legislation, push for immigration reform and espouse its commitment to racial equity after the murder of George Floyd, has apparently deemed the preservation of voter rights less deserving of its attention.
Harvey said in a statement to this editorial board Wednesday that the organization of 1,000 takes positions based on consensus, not majority vote, and it was clear after a 45-minute discussion on April 21 that it wasn’t there.
Rebuke was admirably swift from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who canceled plans to hold their annual addresses with the partnership.
“We can’t in good conscience stand at the dais of the partnership when their will to represent their members and their community so easily crumbles in a time of need,” Hidalgo said in a press conference with Turner.
Harvey said in a statement that “efforts by certain public officials to pressure the partnership into taking a position on this issue or punish it for not taking a position are shortsighted, at best.” He said his organization supports “ready access” to the polls for all Texans, and stands ready to participate in any “serious deliberations” toward that goal.
Deliberations in Austin only get serious when they have to be, when politicians feel enough pressure from powerful people to do the right thing. Harvey and the GHP could supply that pressure — and reasoned ideas for improving legislation that Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are hell-bent to pass in some form.
There’s a dearth of leadership in this state by people who are serious about equity, serious about building an educated workforce, serious about saving Texas from the same pit of oppression and backwardness that has undermined the potential of other Southern states.
Where’s the “Houston Way” when we need it — that code of pragmatism that has at times united conservative businessmen and civil rights activists in this city toward a common pursuit of economic prosperity?
Our leaders must send a message to communities of color — those targeted by the voting legislation — that their voices and their votes matter.
If Harvey is as committed as he claims to equity and inclusion, he wouldn’t accept “no consensus” as an answer. He’d confront his members on why they have chosen partisan loyalty over the truth, over the democratic principle, and frankly, over the math — none of which support the myth of voter fraud Republicans use to justify their restrictions.
If Harvey were serious about supporting voting access for all Texans he’d communicate to his members how these bills do the opposite. He could use this board’s recent multi-part series “The Big Lie” as a teaching aid: despite Texas’ desperate searching for voter fraud only 174 cases, mostly minor, have been prosecuted out of 94 million votes cast since 2005.
He’d swat down any refrains from members who claim these voting restrictions aren’t all that bad.
True, they are relatively mild compared with impossibly high hurdles that southern states once imposed on Black people who attempted to vote, including tests, poll taxes and forcing them to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar.
But voter access is too sacred to be assessed through some distorted prism of historic relativity. Any restriction is detrimental to voter participation — and to the wider access desperately needed in a state that has among the lowest turnout in the nation.
Sure, somebody determined enough will jump through the hoops to vote. But why are there so many hoops?
We know the answer, which has nothing to with election security, and Harvey and the partnership do, too.
For the sake of Houston and all of Texas, they need to say so.