Voter Suppression is Alive and Well in Texas

The GOP-led Texas Legislature is coming up with new ways to suppress the vote. And they have a good reason for doing so. Their clock is ticking.

May 05, 2023

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Friday, May 5, 2023

Voter Suppression Is Alive and Well in Texas

Voter suppression never really goes away in Texas. The folks in charge (for 100 years, Democrats; for the last 30, Republicans) have always denied the right to vote to people they did not like, including at various points women, Blacks, Hispanics, and other “Others.”

To get a sense of the electoral strength of the two major parties in Texas, I like to look at the statewide judicial races for the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Except for the occasional outlier, no one knows the candidates or their qualifications. And so, Republicans vote for Republican candidates and Democrats vote for Democratic candidates. This is not an absolute law, but it’s good enough for government work.

In the 2022 election, the average GOP statewide judicial candidate got 56.674% of the vote and the average Democratic statewide judicial candidate got 42.83% of the vote. So, we could say Texas is a 57R-43D state.

(Results can vary with the statewide elected offices like Governor and Attorney General, because people know more about specific candidates, whose strengths and foibles penetrate the collective unconsciousness. However, this cycle they were close: the GOP statewide nonjudicial candidates averaged 55.167% and the Democratic statewide nonjudicial candidates averaged 42.43%.)

Now, a 14-point average lead in partisan leanings is nothing to sneeze at, but the Texas GOP has a bad case of the sniffles. In the minds of its leading elected officials and consultants, it faces an existential dilemma:

1. Its demographic footprint is irrevocably decaying. All the characteristic elements of the GOP coalition of the last 30 years – white, older, working class, Christian and rural – are shrinking. (There are glimmers of hope in a burgeoning Hispanic turnout for the GOP.)
2. GOP elected officials have become beholden to the most extreme elements of the party, and thus committed to culture war issues like vouchers and drag shows and other grievances.

We could have a “chicken or the egg” discussion about these realities – is the party’s extremism shrinking its base, or is the shrinking base becoming more extreme – but who cares? The truth is, the GOP electoral coalition in Texas, while still successful, is in irreversible demographic decline.

This explains GOP legislative leaders’ relentless drive to make it harder to vote and, in a new twist this session, allow state leaders to overrule county administrators and sometimes even voters in pursuit of the “correct” election results.

The GOP could fix this, of course. It could try to moderate its extreme positions and find common ground on issues like gun safety and abortion, where Texas public policy is among the most extreme in the nation (not that other states aren’t trying to catch up.) Or, its leaders could cut back on racist or Christian nationalist dog whistles.

But I digress. The Texas GOP, as I said, is in a bind of its own choosing, and must rely upon the strategy it has used for 20 years now: shrink the electorate in order to advantage themselves and their candidates. And Ground Zero for that strategy is Harris County, the state’s largest county, which used to be safe for Republicans but increasingly trends Democratic.

This week the Texas Senate passed a bill that would allow the Secretary of State, acting as proxy for the Governor, to invalidate an election and call a new one if, according to NBC News, “there is ‘good cause’ to believe that at least 2% of polling places ran out of usable ballots during voting hours.” The bill applies only to Harris County.

This is a response to last November’s elections, when some polling places ran out of paper ballots. The polling places eventually got their ballots, but the damage was done. Harris County Republicans cried foul, and blamed the delay for everything from the loss of more than 20 specific contests to the oxygen tank explosion that crippled Apollo 13.

But do not fear, fellow Texans. Despite the inordinate energy devoted to bringing Harris County to heel, your Texas legislators are working on plenty of other ways to let the State intervene in local election administration. Last week a Senate committee passed a bill allowing the Secretary of State to fire and replace a county elections administrator (who is normally hired and managed by the county’s commissioners court) if the Secretary believes the administrator is not doing a good job. (This applies statewide, although it is also targeted at Harris County.)

Gee, I remember the good old days when Republicans believed in local control.

But wait, there’s more! Our friends at VoteBeat Texas have the deets:

Senate Bill 2 would raise the penalty for illegal voting to a felony and was approved by the Senate. The House passed its own version of the legislation last week, with key differences from the Senate bill that would have to be reconciled.
Senate Bill 1070 would allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, a multistate program for checking and cleaning voter rolls, if the state can find a replacement. This bill has already been approved by committees in both chambers and is pending discussion on the House floor.
Senate Bill 990 would ban the use of countywide polling locations on Election Day. The bill was approved by the Senate and was referred to the House Elections Committee. A hearing has not been scheduled.*

Of all of them, the last one seems most gratuitous. Countywide polling has proven safe and successful since it was instituted a decade ago. And if it’s not safe and secure on Election Day, why is it safe and secure during early voting?

But perhaps the bill with the most interesting possibilities for mischief is House Bill 87, authored by State Rep. Andrew Murr^[i] (R-Junction). This bill makes several changes to how presidential and vice-presidential electors are chosen and how they cast their ballots. (Readers will recall the “fake elector” schemes attempted after the 2020 election to give loser Donald Trump electoral votes he had not earned.) This bill contains one unnecessary and potentially explosive provision. I’ll let the Brennan Center explain:

The Texas bill would impose a novel roadblock to election certification by requiring a winning candidate for president or vice president to certify, prior to the Electoral College vote, that they are willing and able to serve in the position. If a winning candidate does attest to this, their presidential electors must still vote to affirm or deny the candidate’s willingness and ability to serve before casting their votes for the candidate. If a majority of electors deny the candidate’s ability to serve, the rules requiring the electors to cast their ballots for the nominees for president and vice president of the party that nominated them do not apply. In effect, this bill appears to allow electors to reject their party’s candidate.

This bill has passed the House and been referred to the Senate State Affairs Committee. Time is running short for this and other bills to pass during the session, which ends on Monday the 29^th. Of course, Governor Abbott could call a special session if he’s unsatisfied with the Lege’s output in this (or any other) area.

Stay tuned …

Your weekend … Mother’s Day is Sunday the 14th. Need some gift ideas?

… Democratic congressman Colin Allred, a former NFL star and civil rights attorney, is running against Ted Cruz. See his announcement video here.

… The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein has a terrific essay about “Republicans’ Big Rich-City Problem,” published as the Legislature is considering a “Death Star” bill that would strip cities of their constitutional powers. The gist:

This sweeping offensive is especially striking because, as the Brookings data show, even many red states now rely on blue-leaning metro areas as their principal drivers of economic growth. Texas, for instance, is one of the places where Republicans are pursuing the most aggressive preemption agenda, but the metros won by Biden there in 2020 account for nearly three-fourths of the state’s total economic output.
“State antagonism toward cities is not sustainable,” says Amy Liu, the interim president of the Brookings Institution. “By handicapping local problem solving or attacking local institutions and employers, state lawmakers are undermining the very actors they need to build a thriving regional economy.”

^[i] Election tampering runs in Murr’s family history. His grandfather was Coke Stevenson, who lost to Lyndon Johnson in the legendary “Box 13” US Senate election in 1948.