HOUSTON – Voting in the 2020 election presented Zoe Douglas with a tough choice: As a therapist who met with patients through Zoom late into the evening, she simply couldn’t complete before the polls closed during the early voting.
Then Harris County introduced 24-hour voting for a single day. On the Thursday before the 11pm election, Ms. Douglas met with fast food workers, nurses, construction workers, night owls and other late shift workers at the NRG Arena, one of eight 24-hour polling stations in the county where more than 10,000 people were voting cast their ballots in a single night.
“I can clearly remember people who still wear uniforms. You can tell that they have just left work or maybe go to work. It’s a very varied mix, ”said Ms. Douglas, 27, a native of Houston.
The 24-hour voting was one of the numerous options Harris County had introduced to help residents cast their votes, along with drive-through voting and proactive sending of ballot requests. The new alternatives, tailored to cater to a diverse workforce struggling amid a pandemic in Texas’ largest county, helped increase voter turnout by nearly 10 percent compared to 2016. Nearly 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots, and a task force found that there was no evidence of fraud.
However, Republicans are pushing for action through state law to target the very process that led to such a large turnout. Two bulk bills, including one the house is slated to tackle in the coming week, aim to undo virtually any expansion of the county for 2020.
The bills would make Texas one of the toughest states in the country to pass. And they’re a prime example of Republican-led efforts to roll back access to elections in Democratic cities and populous regions like Atlanta and Maricopa Counties, Arizona, while having far less control over voting in rural areas that tend to be Republicans lean.
Bills in several states indeed create a two-pronged approach to urban and rural areas, raising questions about the different treatment of cities and the large numbers of color voters who live in them. This gap helps fuel opposition from companies that are based in or have a workforce in these locations.
In Texas, Republicans have taken the rare approach of sketching restrictions that only apply to counties over a million residents and target the booming and increasingly diverse metropolitan areas of Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas.
Republicans’ focus on different urban areas, electoral activists say, is reminiscent of the state’s history of racially discriminatory electoral laws – including election taxes and “white primary laws” during the Jim Crow era – that essentially excluded black voters from the electoral process.
Most early Harris County voters were white, according to a study by the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group. But the majority of those who used drive-through or 24-hour voting – the early voting methods that Republican bills would ban – were people of color, the group noted.
“It is clear that they are trying to make it harder for people to choose who are exposed to everyday circumstances, particularly things like poverty and other situations,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat and former Harris County interim clerk who advised many of them overseen and implemented policies during the November elections. “With a 24-hour vote, there weren’t even any claims or legal challenges during the elections.”
Efforts to further restrict voting in Texas come against the backdrop of an increasingly tense showdown between lawmakers and Texas-based companies. Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing financial retaliation for companies that speak out.
American Airlines and Dell Technologies both strongly opposed the bill, and AT&T issued a statement in support of “electoral laws that make it easier for more Americans to vote,” despite no explicit mention of Texas.
American Airlines also dispatched Jack McCain, son of former Senator John McCain, to the Republican lobby in Austin to help lift some of the more stringent restrictions.
Republicans in state legislature appear to be unbowed. In amendments tabled to the state budget this week, House Republicans suggested that “a company that publicly threatened negative reactions related to” electoral integrity “would be ineligible for some state funding.
While these changes did not end up in the final budget, a broader proposal was added to the state’s “wish list,” a compilation of Longshot proposals, threatening companies who comment on “legislative or executive action”. Even if the likelihood of existence is unlikely, the mere inclusion of the proposals on files is viewed by Austin lobbyists and activists as a thinly veiled warning to corporations to keep quiet on voting bills.
The Perryman Group, an economic research and analysis firm based in Waco, said in a recent study that implementing controversial voting measures could result in conferences or events being taken out of the state and causing companies or workers to avoid them. The group estimated that restrictive new laws would cause a huge decline in business activity in the state by 2025 and cost tens of thousands of jobs.
Restrictions in two bulk acts in Texas law include a ban on 24-hour voting, a ban on drive-through voting, and harsh criminal penalties for local election officials who provide support to voters. There are also new limits on the distribution of voting machines, which could lead to a reduction in the number of districts and a ban on the promotion of postal voting.
The bills also include a measure that would make it much more difficult to remove an election observer for inappropriate behavior. Partisan poll observers trained and empowered to observe elections on behalf of a candidate or party have occasionally crossed the line into voter intimidation or other types of misconduct. Harris County election officials said they had received several complaints about Republican election observers over the past year.
Mr. Hollins, a former Harris County employee, said Republicans have recognized that “blacks and browns and the poor and youth” are more likely than others to use flexible choices. “You’re scared of it,” he said.
As Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia and Arizona pass new electoral bills after November’s Democratic victories, Texas pushes for new restrictions despite the support of former President Donald J. Trump with more than 600,000 votes. The effort reflects the dual reality that Republicans are facing in state lawmaking: a base that is intent on voting changes following the loss of Mr Trump in 2020, and a booming population that is becoming increasingly diverse.
Senator Bryan Hughes, a Northeast Texas Republican who sponsored the Senate bill, defended it as part of a long effort to strengthen “electoral security” in Texas.
“I know there is a big national debate going on now and we may get drawn into this, but this is nothing new to Texas,” said Hughes in an interview. He said lawmakers had tried to reset access to email voting as the process was more prone to fraud. He offered no evidence, and numerous studies have shown that electoral fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States.
Mr Hughes said the proposed ban on thoroughfare was due to the difficulty of gaining access to partisan election observers at the sites and that a 24-hour vote was problematic as it was difficult to find election observers to work night shifts.
But many voters in Harris County, with its 4.7 million population ranks third in the country and larger than 25 states, see a different motive.
Kristie Osi-Shackelford, a Houston costume designer who worked on temporary contracts to support her family during the pandemic, was voting 24/7 because it gave her the flexibility she needed when juggling work and her three Raised children. She said it took her less than 10 minutes.
“I’m sure there are people who may not have voted in the last election but got the chance to do so at night, and it’s kind of sad that the powers that be who feel that way have to be taken away for the integrity of the elections to protect, ”said Ms. Osi-Shackelford. “And I struggled to find words because it’s so irritating and I’m tired. I’m tired of hearing the same stuff and seeing the same stuff so blatantly over and over for years. “
Brittany Hyman, 35, was eight months pregnant by the time election day approached and was also raising a 4-year-old. For fear of Covid-19, but also of the mere logistics of navigating a line in the surveys, Ms. Hyman voted at one of the transit locations.
“The opportunity to go through the set-up was a savior for me,” said Ms. Hyman. She added that because she would have been pregnant, she likely would not have risked waiting in a long line to vote.
The Harris County’s drive-through vote, which was used by more than 127,000 voters in the general election, immediately caught the attention of Republicans, who sued Mr. Hollins and the county to outlaw the practice and overturn all votes cast -through process. The Texas Supreme Court ruled against the Republicans in late October.
Other provisions in the GOP bill, while not targeting Harris County as directly, will most likely still have the greatest impact on the state’s largest county. A proposal to provide a uniform number of voting machines in each district could affect the ability to deploy additional machines in densely populated areas.
This month, in another escalation of public pressure on lawmakers, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, gathered more than a dozen speakers, including business leaders, civil rights activists and former athletes, for a 90-minute press conference in which he denounced the bill.
“What is happening here in Texas is a warning shot for the rest of the country,” said Lina Hidalgo, Harris County judge and Democrat, who is campaigning for more electoral access in the county. “First Georgia, then Texas, then more and more states, and soon we will take the biggest step back since Jim Crow. And it’s up to all of us to stop that. “
