Republicans Are Making Texas’ Strict Voting Laws Even Tighter

Texas already has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country—and they’re about to get even more onerous.

The Texas House passed legislation to put new limits on both mail and in-person voting early Friday morning, in spite of howls from Democrats and civil rights groups that they’re aimed at making it harder to vote, not to secure the ballot.

The biggest changes in the bill are aimed at making sure counties can’t proactively make it easier for their citizens to vote, after a number large, Democratic-leaning counties made changes that pissed off Republicans last election. 

Specifically, the bill expressly prohibits counties from automatically sending absentee ballot requests to voters, an effort that Harris County (Houston) did last election. The bill also gives more access and rights to partisan poll-watchers, which Democrats worry could lead to a spike in voter intimidation—especially after GOP poll-watchers caused disruptions in places like Michigan last election cycle.

The bill also creates a requirement for people who help those who need help filling out their ballots to sign, under penalty of perjury, a pledge stating they "did not pressure, encourage, coerce, or intimidate the voter into choosing me to provide assistance." And it increases the penalties for people who violate its laws—knowingly or accidentally.

The bill is a top priority of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is up for reelection in 2022. Abbott touted the measure on Thursday, as it came up for debate, as necessary for “election integrity”:

But Texas already has rather restrictive voting laws—and Texas Republicans were forced to admit that they didn’t see any major problems with voting fraud in the 2020 election, even as they pushed these new restrictions.

“We don’t need to wait for bad things to happen to protect the security of the election,” Texas state Republican Rep. Briscoe Cain, the chairman of the Texas House Elections Committee and the bill’s chief sponsor, argued during the debate.

Texas was one of only five states that didn’t allow most of its citizens to vote by mail in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic raged. It does allow for two weeks of early voting, better than some other states. But it doesn’t provide any weekend early voting for people whose jobs keep them from voting during the week—and its voter identification laws are some of the strictest in the nation.

Civil rights groups decried the bill.

“Under cover of darkness, the Texas House just passed one of the worst anti-voting bills in the country,” American Civil Liberties Union Texas policy director Sarah Labowitz said in a statement. “They know the bill is designed to suppress the vote by making voting harder and allowing poll watchers to intimidate voters. Texans deserve better than to wake up and find out that lawmakers jammed through a law that will make participating in our democracy harder and scarier.”

Republicans have made new voting restrictions a top priority in Texas and across the country, seeking to solve a problem that many admit didn’t exist in their own states during the 2020 election. The bills are a solution in search of a fake problem. Even though President Trump and many Republicans howl that widespread voting fraud was rampant in 2020, they’ve been unable to find any examples of it occurring. Republicans are about to add Texas to the list of states with unnecessary new voting restrictions that already includes Georgia, Iowa, and Florida, which passed its law on Thursday.

The Texas bill got significantly less punitive during the overnight debate. Republicans who crafted the legislation and control the Texas Legislature worked with Democrats to pass a series of amendments that eliminated many of the criminal penalties that were originally contained in the bill.

It’s not clear what the final bill will look like. The Texas Senate still needs to sign off on a version of the legislation that can pass both chambers, and the bill will likely go through more changes.