Elections bill deserves scrutiny, given GOP’s blind eye to Big Lie
To hear Republicans tell it, the House Democrats who broke quorum last week to prevent passage of an “election integrity” bill are overreacting — overreacting on purpose, perhaps, to help boost their public profiles as well as their fundraising.
Much of the debate over Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 “has been based on misconceptions and hyperbole,” writes state Rep. Andrew Murr, an impressively mustachioed Republican from Junction and the author of HB 3, in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle.
In his telling, the far-reaching legislation was informed by a desire to clarify election procedures in Texas after a 2020 election that was, if nothing else, shaped by the pandemic. Concerns about the spread of COVID-19 led state and local leaders to implement various changes on short notice, including drive-thru and 24-hour voting in Harris County.
“Unfortunately, elements of our election process were caught up in the general confusion, with voting regulations sometimes differing from one area of the state to the next as individual counties created ad hoc voting measures outside of Texas’ election code,” Murr observed.
Gov. Greg Abbott, similarly, asserted in a series of media appearances last week that the bill would make it harder to cheat but easier to vote. For example, he notes, it would expand early voting hours.
That’s true, at least in some parts of the state. As it stands, counties with populations greater than 100,000 are required to have at least 12 hours of early voting in the run-up to Election Day; the bills filed during the special session would lower that threshold to 30,000 people.
Jon Mark Hogg, a lawyer based in San Angelo and founder of The 134 PAC, considers this one of several “silver linings” of the legislation at hand. Insofar as the change would make it easier to vote in rural Texas, which is reliably red, it would
help Republicans in statewide elections. But Democrats in rural Texas would also be able to take advantage of the change.
Still, you would expect a far-reaching elections bill to have its pros and cons. State
Rep. Diego Bernal of San Antonio, who was among the House Democrats to flee to Washington to block the voting restrictions bill, on Tuesday pointed to an array of problems with the legislation that Republicans muscled through a committee hearing over the weekend before the quorum break.
An application for a mail-in ballot could be cast out if it were filled out using a mechanical pencil rather than a pen, for example. A person could potentially be exposed to criminal liability for offering a friend a ride to the polls. Perhaps most troubling, in his view, is a provision that would empower partisan poll watchers to engage in all sorts of mischief, by stipulating that their first offense would be met with a mere warning.
“So every determined Proud Boy can cause commotion at a polling site and the judge can’t do anything to stop them,” Bernal said. “The law will demand that they are allowed to stay.”
“That is absolutely insane,” he continued. “You are legalizing harassment and intimidation.”
Indeed, Abbott himself inadvertently acknowledged the potential problem with this provision while making the case against drive-thru voting in an appearance on Chris Wallace’s Fox News program.
“If you do drive-thru voting, are you going to have people in the car with you?” the governor asked. “It could be somebody from your employer or somebody else that may have some coercive effect on the way that you would cast your ballot, which is contrary to you going into the ballot box, alone, and no one there watching over your shoulder.”
Well, which is it?
And, let’s note, the provisions expanding the powers of poll watchers wouldn’t just apply to right-wing activists; an antifa member could just as easily take advantage of the opportunity.
There are, to be clear, some Democratic legislators who would understandably have qualms about any “election integrity” bill that Republicans put forward this year, in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Democrat Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by a 306-232 margin in the Electoral College.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo reckons that the Texas bills and similar measures that have been filed in most GOP-led states are “about pandering.”
“Passing the laws would only cement the lie and erode our democracy,” she tweeted.
It’s also worth remembering the bloody history of voting rights battles in this state and country: the beatings, the bombings, the literacy tests, the white primaries, the poll taxes — which were collected, in Texas, into the 1960s.
State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, a Democrat who has represented her north Houston district since 1972, recalled that her grandmother used to save her pennies and nickels in order to exercise her right to vote. She couldn’t afford to save quarters, because she earned only $2 per week.
“What is it going to take for us to be able to be Americans in this country?” asked Thompson, who is Black, at a news conference Friday. “I am an American and I want to vote without somebody infringing on my rights and the rights of my constituents.”
Perhaps we can’t expect Republican leaders to take these points to heart. But they should, at least, be able to understand why so many voters are suspicious of politicians promising to improve “election integrity,” even as they turn a blind eye to Trump’s Big Lie.
And beyond that, there are genuinely worrisome provisions in the legislation at hand, which deserve a full and transparent public debate — even if Republicans are in “no mood,” as Abbott said last week, for further negotiations with colleagues on the other side of the aisle.