Castro, O’Rourke rally in Austin against Texas election reforms

Democrats say bills will suppress votes from people of color

AUSTIN — Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro joined forces at the Texas Capitol on Saturday to rally against election reform bills that they called blatant attempts to suppress voters in Black and Hispanic communities.

As statewide elections near, Castro said Republicans in the Texas Legislature are responding with numerous bills aimed at suppressing minority voters.

“We are here today to say, ‘No, we will not stand for that,’ ” the former San Antonio mayor told hundreds of activists who gathered on the south steps of the Capitol less than 24 hours after the Texas House approved an election reform bill that Democrats have vocally opposed.

O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman who is weighing a potential run for governor, said Republicans are focusing on restricting voting when there are much bigger issues facing the state.

“These jokers can’t even keep the lights on, or the heat on, or the water running when the temperature drops in Texas, now they want to take over our elections,” O’Rourke said in reference to the deadly February storms that left millions without electricity.

But the authors of the two biggest election bills, Senate Bill 7 and House Bill 6, have said their legislation attempts to make elections in Texas more secure.

The Texas House passed a heavily amended version of Senate Bill 7 on Friday afternoon by a 78-64 vote, with eight members not voting. That bill would give partisan poll watchers increased access and power at polling sites and crack down on what Republicans call vote harvesting, where outside groups help voters fill out applications for absentee ballots

and help them submit those votes in time to be counted during an election. State Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Mineola Republican, is the lead sponsor of SB 7 and says vote harvesters can tamper with ballots, which he’s trying to stop.

“We want a system that people can trust, we want it to be accurate, and we want folks to know that it’s accurate,” Hughes said last month during debates over the bill. “If folks don’t trust the system, they’re not going to vote.”

But the Senate version of SB 7 that passed the Senate last month by an 18-13 vote goes much further and would reduce early voting polling sites in some minority communities, end latenight voting centers and bar drive-through voting locations. The largest county in Texas — Harris — used drivethru voting and late-night voting, which studies have shown were popular among Black and Hispanic voters and helped boost turnout in Harris County — a place Joe Biden dominated.

Shevann Steuben, a Houston resident and the president of Texas NAACP Youth and College Division, said the election bills seem aimed at minority communities that are voting in increasingly larger numbers and threatening nearly three decades of GOP dominance.

“We know why this is happening,” she said. “We continue to see more turnout from our people of color, from our voters of color.”

She said the legislation confirms her suspicions.

“The authors and supporters of these bills are afraid of us,” she said.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who oversees the Texas Senate, has made no secret that a big driver of the election bills is Harris County because he said officials there went too far to expand voting options that were not expressly allowed by the Texas Legislature. But Harris County officials say they followed state law and didn’t do anything that was prohibited in expanding voting options.

The rally comes with just over three weeks left in the legislative session, and the election bill still in flux. When the House passed its version of SB 7, it was a vastly different bill with 18 different amendments added to it during an all-night debate on the bill that started Thursday and went into the wee hours of Friday before getting a final vote late Friday.

Because that bill is different from the original version of SB 7, it now must go back to the Senate, which is likely to reject the changes, triggering a special committee of House and Senate members to meet behind closed doors to hammer out a negotiated bill. If both chambers vote out the same exact bill, it goes to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made election security one of his priority bills this year.

Photos by Matthew Busch / Contributor Gina Fant-Simon, center, and Shari Fant-Simon, right, cheer during a voting rights rally Saturday at the Texas Capitol held in response to bills making their way through the Legislature that critics say would restrict voting access for Texans.

“InfoWars” host Owen Shroyer, center, who disrupted speakers during the rally, backs away with his private security.