Texas Democrats who fled the state on Monday to avoid holding a vote on GOP election reforms are protesting a slate of changes that are even less aggressive than a bill they blocked in May.
More than 50 state Democrats boarded chartered planes and buses, as well as commercial flights, to deny the Texas Legislature a quorum this week during a special session called by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The Democrats characterized their move as an effort to take the voting rights fight to Washington, D.C. They appeared Tuesday morning at the Capitol to speak out about the Republican-led reforms and met subsequently with a number of Democratic lawmakers.
WHAT’S REALLY IN THE TEXAS VOTING REFORM BILL THAT DEMOCRATS ARE FIGHTING
But the bill they are railing against does not contain some of the more controversial provisions that Texas Republicans attempted to pass at the end of the regular legislative session in May. Democrats successfully blocked that bill by walking out of the chamber en masse, running out the clock on the regular session and forcing Abbott to call a special one.
After the walkout, Abbott vetoed the part of the state budget that funds the Legislature to heap extra pressure on lawmakers who were refusing to pass the voting reforms. After the Texas fiscal year ends in August, all legislative staff (Republicans and Democrats), as well as nonpartisan employees of the Legislature, will stop receiving a paycheck and lose their health coverage.
Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, said Abbott could continue to call 30-day special sessions until Democrats return, rendering their tactic less effective in the long run.
“I view this more as a publicity mechanism,” Jones told the Washington Examiner. “It was a mechanism designed to gain publicity for their efforts and to raise money and maybe to extract some minor concessions from Republicans in exchange for returning in a timely manner. But the difficulty that they run into is that Greg Abbott is going to be under pressure not to negotiate with them, and if anything, to double down.”
Abbott has said lawmakers who fled the Lone Star State will be arrested upon their return to Texas thanks to a measure passed by the remaining state elected officials. Under the Texas Constitution, lawmakers can be detained and brought back to the state Capitol against their will once a quorum call has been issued.
Here is what is in the bill Democrats are protesting — and what is not anymore.
BANS ON 24-HOUR VOTING & DRIVE-THRU VOTING
The pair of Republican bills under consideration in the Texas Legislature would stop two practices that the state’s most populous county used during the pandemic.
Harris County, which includes Houston, set up round-the-clock voting and allowed voters to cast ballots from their cars during the 2020 election, citing public health concerns. Republicans objected to the practices at the time and structured the bill to ban both.
The bill would contain early voting hours to a window between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., effectively outlawing 24-hour voting.
“It’s tough to argue that banning 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting (which didn’t exist in Texas prior to the pandemic in 2020 and only existed really in Harris County, among the 254 counties) that somehow preventing those in the future is voter suppression,” Jones said. “If that’s the argument, we’ve had voter suppression forever.”
PARTISAN POLL WATCHERS
A controversial section of the bill would give more authority to partisan poll watchers, virtually allowing them greater access to all aspects of voting and ballot counting.
Proponents argue the access is necessary to ensure transparent elections. In some states, Trump-friendly poll watchers claimed after the 2020 race that they were unfairly prevented from observing the count, feeding into former President Donald Trump’s false assertions that the election was stolen.
But opponents of the new poll-watching rules say they could lead to voter intimidation and dissuade some vulnerable Texans from casting their ballots.
“I think it is fair to criticize particularly the empowerment of poll watchers,” Jones said. “If I was to point out the one [provision] that is the most pernicious, it would be the empowering of partisan poll watchers.”
The bills would set up obstacles to removing poll watchers sent from political campaigns or parties, even if there are reports that the poll watchers are scaring away voters.
ABSENTEE BALLOT REQUIREMENTS
The new bills would require voters to provide some form of identification when requesting an absentee ballot.
If passed, the reforms would ask voters to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their application for a mail-in ballot.
But there are still ways to get around the requirement. If a Texas voter claims they have neither a license nor a Social Security number, they can sign an affidavit swearing they have no other identification and still receive their absentee ballot.
The bills would also ban state officials from sending an absentee ballot to anyone who did not specifically request one. And they would impose stricter punishments on those who engage in ballot harvesting; the Supreme Court recently upheld Arizona’s right to ban ballot harvesting in a blow to the legal battles that some voting rights advocates are fighting.
WHAT GOT CUT?
When Texas Democrats walked out of the chamber in May at the end of the regular session, the original bill, Senate Bill 7, was effectively killed. State Republicans had more time to put together the proposals currently under consideration, and some of the provisions to which Democrats objected most aggressively were left on the cutting room floor.
Jones said Senate Bill 7 was drafted haphazardly.
“From a good governance perspective, it was ridiculous that you’re essentially cobbling together major election reform overnight in such an incompetent way,” he said of the original bill. “For the special session, they had the time to revisit the legislation and have it 100% ready by the time the session began on July 8, so this has been vetted and reviewed.”
The new reforms do not include restrictions on Sunday early voting that voting rights advocates said targeted the black community.
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The original bill did not allow early voting on Sundays to start until the afternoons, effectively banning a long-standing African American tradition of churches encouraging members to vote after services in drives known as “Souls to the Polls.”
Republicans also dropped a provision in the original bill that lowered the standard for challenging election results in court.
