A voting reform bill in Texas has sparked intense pushback from the Left and ignited a national conversation about threats to democracy, despite proposing relatively few changes to the structure of the state’s election laws.
After a dramatic walkout by Texas Democrats on Sunday night temporarily dashed Republicans’ hopes of passing the bill by denying them a quorum at the end of the legislative session, some Democrats are renewing calls to overhaul elections on the federal level to stop legislation such as Texas’s.
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Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday he would veto the part of the state budget that funds lawmakers’ paychecks — telling state legislators there would be “no pay for those who abandon their responsibilities.”
Abbott must call a special session of the legislature for a reintroduced version of the bill to progress.
“Once the session ends, it’s gone,” Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told the Washington Examiner. “Certainly, it can be reintroduced, but they have to start the entire process from scratch.”
Here’s what was in the bill that Democrats, for now, successfully killed.
ENDS DRIVE-THRU VOTING
The Texas bill, known in its current form as Senate Bill 7, would end the practice of drive-thru voting, which a limited number of polling locations offered in 2020 to address public health concerns related to the pandemic.
The bill also would have ended 24-hour voting during the early voting period — another practice utilized for the first time during the pandemic. Harris County, the state’s most populous county, rolled out the features last year over the objections of state Republicans, who specifically included bans on the practices in order to remove the ambiguity from the law that Harris County officials relied upon during the 2020 election.
“Those are things that are only Jim Crow 2.0 if you believe Jim Crow was operative in 2018,” Jones said.
Republicans in other states have faced similar headwinds for attempting to roll back pandemic-era voting options, however. In Georgia, critics railed against a provision in its controversial law that limited ballot drop boxes — even though the law actually authorized the permanent use of drop boxes for the first time, after state officials allowed them to be used on an emergency basis in 2020.
LOCATION OF POLLING PLACES
One of the most highly criticized elements of the Texas bill would have required a more even distribution of polling places within densely populated counties.
“The analysis of that shows that there’s a good chance that it’ll minimize the polling places in neighborhoods of color,” Brad Rottinghaus, political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Washington Examiner.
The provision applies only to counties with populations of 1 million people or more, which would have included counties with big cities that tend to vote Democratic. Evenly spreading the polling locations based on state legislature districts within those counties could, according to some experts, take polling locations out of downtown areas and put more in the suburbs, where near-universal car ownership and other factors make them less necessary.
For people who rely on public transportation in the city, however, a higher concentration of nearby polling places can be essential.
MORE PROOF FOR VOTING BY MAIL
Texas already had somewhat restrictive absentee voting rules on the books; voters needed to be physically out of their county during the voting period, over the age of 65, or disabled to qualify to vote by mail.
The new bill would have added a requirement that voters requesting an absentee ballot specify the grounds on which they qualify to vote absentee.
Voting rights advocates have also pushed back against a provision that asked absentee voting applicants to list their driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers on their applications.
But the bill lays out a way to get around the requirement if a voter had neither a license nor a Social Security number; “a statement by the applicant that the applicant has not been issued a number” in either case would also be a sufficient entry on an absentee ballot application, according to the text of the legislation.
Election officials could not, under the bill, send mail-in voting applications to anybody who did not request one.
EARLY VOTING HOURS
While Senate Bill 7 would put more specific parameters on the hours during which voters can cast their ballots early and in person, it did not shorten the early voting period that begins 17 days before the election.
The bill mandated counties offer a minimum of nine hours a day during the early voting period, no earlier than 6 a.m. and no later than 9 p.m. It would have required counties with populations larger than 30,000 to expand early voting to 12 hours per day during the final week of the period.
Saturday and Sunday early voting would be mandatory during the last weekend of the early voting period in counties with more than 30,000 people, according to the bill.
But the window of voting permitted on Sunday has drawn the ire of voting rights advocates. The bill would limit Sunday early voting to take place only between the hours of 1 p.m. and 9 p.m. and require counties to offer a minimum of just six hours of early voting that day, compared to 12 on Saturday.
Critics have said the move is specifically designed to curb the efforts of black churches to turn out the vote after Sunday services, a tradition known as “souls to the polls.”
EMPOWERED POLL WATCHERS
Following the messy legal fights that unfolded in several states after the 2020 election, Texas Republicans wrote new rules for what partisan poll watchers can do inside polling locations and centers where votes will be counted.
Poll watchers can now observe nearly all aspects of the election, from voters casting their ballots to the transfer of voted ballots to the tabulating centers.
“A watcher is entitled to sit or stand near enough to see and hear” the conduct of election officers, the bill stated — perhaps addressing a concern raised by Trump supporters during the 2020 election when partisan observers said they were in some cases prevented from getting close enough to the vote count to understand what was happening in a meaningful way.
Any election official who obstructs the view of a poll watcher could face criminal charges under the reforms.
Critics of this provision say the potentially intrusive presence of poll watchers from political parties could have a chilling effect on some voters.
CHALLENGING FUTURE ELECTIONS
Senate Bill 7 would lower the standard for campaigns or political groups to challenge election results in court — potentially resulting, some critics say, in more post-election chaos than what the public endured after 2020.
In a section labeled “OVERTURNING ELECTION,” the bill specifies that “[i]f the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.”
Poll watchers would also have the ability to file for injunctive relief if they say they see suspicious activity, opening another avenue for court challenges to election results in the future.
TIGHTENING SECURITY
Texas Republicans have argued that their bill is, first and foremost, an election security bill.
Former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that Democrats stole the election from him have driven widespread mistrust in elections among GOP voters, and even though that mistrust is based on a lie, Republicans have argued voting reforms are necessary to address it.
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Much of the legislation deals with new election integrity measures, such as rules for cleaning up voter registration rolls more regularly and rules for the handling of data from electronic voting machines.
Video surveillance of all areas where ballots are stored would be required in counties with 100,000 people or more.
