- Joined
- Apr 18, 2013
- Messages
- 93,606
- Reaction score
- 81,668
- Location
- Barsoom
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
In Texas, GOP voting bills zero in on Democratic Houston
Republican Jim Crow state legislatures are now busy restricting voting in Texas and Arkansas.
4/16/21
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The nation’s next big voting battle underway in Texas would outlaw 24-hour polling places, drive-thru voting and make it a crime for elections officials to mail unsolicited absentee ballot applications. Put another way: Everything Houston — the state’s biggest Democratic stronghold — did to expand ballot access last year, when the threat of the coronavirus made voting in-person more hazardous. Amid a GOP-led campaign to tighten voting laws, Republican lawmakers in in Texas have been unusually explicit in zeroing in on Houston and surrounding Harris County as they push to tighten the state's voting laws. One of the country's largest and most racially diverse counties, Harris rolled out new ways to vote in 2020 on a scale like nowhere else in Texas. 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 from 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.
Texas is the biggest state where Republicans have vowed to make voting changes since 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 Gov. Greg Abbott supports the efforts. The apparent targeting of Harris County, where 44% of the nearly 5 million residents are Latino and 20% are Black, is seen by opponents as evidence that Republicans are trying to suppress minority turnout in Democratic strongholds. “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.' Even though thousands of Republicans are going to be disenfranchised, too.” Texas already has some of the tightest voting restrictions in the country and Republicans say rising voter turnout is evidence that votes are not being suppressed — a claim that ignores that the state's population is booming.
Republican Jim Crow state legislatures are now busy restricting voting in Texas and Arkansas.