Being more familiar with Texas’s election laws than the average person, I’ve become accustomed to watching as the narrative on proposed reforms diverges wildly from the facts on the ground. Such was the case when local media made preposterous claims about the Texas legislature’s elimination of “rolling voting” in 2019. Then there were the demonstrably false claims that Governor Abbott had engaged in voter-suppression tactics during the November 2020 election. Today, the topic is the election-integrity reform that was filed in the first called session of the 87th Texas legislature. As Texas Democrats, after having bolted from the state capital, stand in Washington, D.C., singing “We Shall Overcome” on the steps the of the United States Capitol, it is worth asking: What is actually in, as Vox calls it, “the GOP voting bill that literally caused Texas Democrats to flee the state?”
The bill restores the rule of law in elections. It prohibits many of the well-meaning, but not sustainable, efforts by local officials in Harris County to make pandemic voting easier, including sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, implementing drive-through voting, offering 24-hour voting, or simply changing procedures beyond what is authorized in the Texas Election Code. Opponents refer to this rollback as “voter suppression,” but what they don’t tell you is that these practices, while not expressly illegal, were never clearly legal in the first place — and certainly had never been done before. From the perspective of voters in Texas, these provisions change nothing.
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