Texas election bill passes Senate, debate continues in Legislature’s final days
Members of the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday were poised to debate a high-profile Texas elections bill that has garnered criticism over fears it will suppress voters.
Senate Bill 7 passed a hurdle early Sunday morning when it was approved by lawmakers after an overnight debate. The House was expected take up the bill later in the day in a race against the clock to vote on the bill. As of 5 p.m., representatives hadn’t yet begun consideration of the bill.
Texas senators debated the newly crafted bill, which limits when and how people can vote, after the text of the compromise version was released Saturday. The bill, written behind closed doors in a conference committee, includes measures from both the House and Senate’s versions of the legislation.
“This of course is the work of two chambers, each prioritizing critical reforms and then working together to decide how to strike the balance and how to get to the right place,” the bill’s author, Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, said. “We want elections to be secure and accessible.”
But as lawmakers braced to take up the bill, some Democrats who were part of the committee tasked with coming up with an agreed version — including two from Tarrant County — described being left out of the negotiation process. Democrats also raised concerns about not having enough time to vet the latest version of the bill before it was considered.
The Senate, with the help of a procedural maneuver allowing lawmakers to take up the bill on an accelerated timeline, debated the bill starting late Saturday night before adopting the conference committee report. Sunday is the last day for both the House and Senate to adopt such reports laying out the new versions of bills. A bill goes into a conference committee when a chamber doesn’t agree on the amendments made to a bill in the opposite chamber.
The legislation, if made law, would ban drive-thru voting and set times when polling places can operate, effectively banning 24-hour voting. The bill would also offer protections for poll watchers and require a person seeking an application to vote by mail because of a disability to provide the “specific grounds on which the voter is eligible for a ballot to be voted by mail.”
The bill would additionally make it a state jail felony for a public official to send an application to vote by mail to a person who didn’t request one and would make it a Class B misdemeanor for an election officer to “knowingly refuse to accept a (poll) watcher for service.” A new section of the bill would also make it easier to overturn the results of an election, according to the ACLU of Texas.
Among other measures in the bill, Hughes also noted that the bill would require voting systems to have a verifiable paper trail by 2026 and calls for a video surveillance system to keep a record of areas containing voted ballots.
Senate Democrats expressed concerns about various parts of the bill, including the language blocking drive-thru voting, which they said largely benefited Black and Latino voters. Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised concerns about part of the bill that would preclude early voting before 1 p.m. on the last Sunday of early voting and the impact it could have on “Souls to the Polls” events held by Black congregations encouraging voter go to the polls after church.
“I’m going to tell you what my district considers SB 7,” Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, said. “And y’all are going to disagree… but my district, where I’m from, where I’m elected to be a voice in this chamber, they do call and refer to it as Jim Crow 2.0.”
Lawmakers questioned Hughes about parts of the bill that would create election-related crimes. Hughes stressed that it’s not voters themselves that criminal penalties are aimed at. He said the criminal offenses are aimed at “vote harvesters and at those election workers who might be tempted to violate the law.”
Before considering the content of the bill in its entirety, the Senate voted 9-12 for a resolution approving measures that were in the conference committee version of Senate Bill 7 but not the versions passed in the House or Senate. Hughes said some of the language laid out in the resolution was in other legislation considered by the House and Senate, but other measures were developed in the process of crafting the compromise version.
Some lawmakers raised concerns about the process, including Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, who expressed unease at the idea of there being parts of the bill not vetted by members of the public.
“I couldn’t in good faith vote to pass a bill the size of this one that will affect the voting rights of every single Texan of voting age when they’ve been deprived of the opportunity to voice their opinions on the final package of this bill, either personally in committee hearings or through the voice of their legislators,” said Powell, who was part of the committee tasked with crafting a compromise version of the bill.
She and other Democrats described being left out of much of the process. During an exchange with Hughes, Powell, the only Democratic senator on the committee, pointed out that she represents a minority-majority district.
“And was I ever invited to participate in that process, to attend a single conversation or meeting about what we’re doing here tonight?” she said.
Hughes replied, “Senator, the Senate conferees never sat down for a meeting.”
“You and I spoke. You gave me some information in writing. We talked about it. Various members talked about it. But I can certify to you, there was never a meeting of the Senate conferees, you didn’t miss anything,” he said.
“And I actually spoke to you walking down the hallway on the way to a committee meeting,” Powell said.
Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, said she was involved in conversations on the formation of the bill, but likened the talks to “more of an explanation, instead of a negotiation.” Collier and other members of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus held a news conference Sunday afternoon ahead of the expected House debate on the bill.
“It seemed like the fix was in from the beginning,” Collier said. “From the beginning, there was no interest in hearing about how these measures would impact people of color. In fact, the bill got worse.”
Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe said the group is ready to pursue a lawsuit if the bill passes and is signed into law.
The bill has received national attention, including from President Joe Biden who on Saturday called the bill “wrong and un-American.”
“Texas legislators put forth a bill that joins Georgia and Florida in advancing a state law that attacks the sacred right to vote,” Biden said in a statement. “It’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year — and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans.”
This story was originally published May 30, 2021 at 11:03 AM.
