Texas House advances voting bill
AUSTIN, TEXAS» The Texas House of Representatives passed a sweeping election overhaul bill Friday, clearing a major hurdle in a months-long push by Republicans to introduce a host of new voting rules.
Passage of the bill came a week after a handful of Democrats returned to the state Capitol, effectively ending a 38-day walkout that included the flight of much of the party’s state House delegation to Washington and drew national attention to the fight over voting rights in Texas.
It signaled the end stages in the most protracted battle in a nationwide Republican campaign to harden election rules in response to false claims about the integrity of the 2020 presidential contest.
The House’s version of the bill, which passed on a nearly party-line vote of 80-41, will be considered by the state Senate before it can be sent to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott.
The bill would ban voting changes that were introduced last year by local officials, such as drivethru polling and 24-hour voting; greatly empower partisan poll watchers; limit the mailing of absentee ballot applications; and increase civil and criminal penalties for voter fraud and for election officials who run afoul of the election code.
The legislation has long been a priority for Abbott, a Republican, who pledged repeatedly to call special sessions until lawmakers sent a voting bill for him to sign.
The bill passed the state Senate this month, but because the House made changes and amendments, the Senate must review it again.
Both chambers are controlled by Republicans. The Senate can vote to concur with the changes, which would send the bill to Abbott, or to send the legislation into a conference committee, in which differences between the two chambers’ bills would be worked out behind closed doors.
Previous iterations of the bill had been stymied by House Democrats’ decisions to break quorum in two consecutive sessions, denying Republicans the necessary minimum of lawmakers to conduct business.
During legislative debate Thursday and Friday, Democrats denounced the proposed new voting restrictions as disproportionately harmful to Black and Latino Texans. Their amendments, aimed at weakening the legislation, mostly failed.
“If you think that you’re winning today,” state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, a long-serving Democrat from Houston, told her Republican colleagues Friday, “you will reap what you sow.”
Republicans’ response was, in essence, that it was not their job to entice more people to vote.
During debate Thursday, state Rep. Andrew Murr, a Republican from rural Kerrville, applied Texas Republicans’ mantra of personal responsibility to voting.
“I’m not sure the goal of the state is to actively seek out voters,” he said. “The state is not so proactive that it tries to grab all the voters.”
Several late amendments to the bill addressed the integrity of voting and ballot counting systems, an outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in last year’s election. Some passed, such as a requirement that large Texas counties provide live video of ballot-counting areas. Others did not, such as a Republican amendment to conduct a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Texas.
One of the last amendments Thursday was aimed at avoiding criminal prosecutions of formerly incarcerated people for voting — people such as Crystal Mason and Hervis Rogers — by instructing judges to tell those convicted of felonies that they are ineligible to vote.