Houston the new target for GOP vote restrictions

The United States’ next big voting battle is under way in Texas, where Republicans are trying to outlaw 24-hour polling places and drive-thru voting as options, and to make it a crime for election officials to mail unsolicited absentee ballot applications.

All were efforts that Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold, tried last year, when the threat of the coronavirus made voting in-person more hazardous.

Republican lawmakers have been unusually explicit in zeroing in on Houston and surrounding Harris County as they push to restrict voting in the state.

One of the country’s largest and most racially diverse counties, Harris County rolled out new ways to vote in 2020 on a scale like nowhere else in Texas, and although there is no evidence of fraud resulting from votes cast from cars or in the dead of night, Republicans are determined to prevent it happening again.

The effort is one of the clearest examples of how the GOP’s nationwide campaign to tighten voting laws can target Democrats, even as they insist the measures are not partisan. With Americans increasingly sorted into liberal urban areas and conservative rural ones, geography can be an effective proxy for partisanship. Proposals tailored to cities or that take population into account are bound to have a greater impact on Democratic voters.

That’s likely the case in Georgia, where a new voting law prescribes the number absentee ballot drop boxes per county and uses a formula based on the number of registered voters or early voting sites. Election officials in the Atlanta area have said the change will slash the number of drop boxes available to their voters when compared to 2020 levels.

Texas is the biggest state where Republicans have vowed to make voting changes on the back of Donald Trump’s false claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election. A sweeping package known as House Bill 6 that would tighten voting rules is awaiting a full vote, and Republican Governor Greg Abbott supports the efforts.

Included in the state House bill are measures that would grant partisan poll watchers wider latitude and make it a felony for an elections officer to send mail-voting applications to households that didn’t request them, as Harris County tried to do because of the pandemic. It also contains elements similar to a state Senate bill that passed its first key vote this month.

The apparent targeting of Harris County, where 44 per cent of the nearly 5 million residents are Latino and 20 per cent are black, is seen by opponents as evidence that Republicans are trying to suppress turnout in Democratic strongholds. Republicans deny the claims.

Not in dispute are the rising electoral stakes in Texas’ biggest county. President Joe Biden won it by more than 13 percentage points, a commanding margin that helped get him within 6 points of Trump statewide.

“The math is simple,” former Harris County elections clerk Chris Hollins said of Democrats’ performance in the Houston area in November. “Their take is, ‘Let’s make it harder for Harris County to vote’.”

The county exemplifies the GOP’s slipping grip on fast-changing Texas. In 2004, former President George W Bush, who is from Texas, easily won Harris County and Republicans ran every major countywide office. But recent years have been routs for Democrats, whose wins now extend down the ballot to local judicial races, including 17 black women who were elected to the bench in 2018.