Plus the open carry gun laws that now allow anyone to carry a gun—no license, no training, and I doubt any real background checks.
Many laws were released at the same time, but it is the abortion law that has sucked all the oxygen and left very little coverage of the fact that Texas just declared open season for any idiot to brandish a gun to show what a big man he is and likely kill someone. And they just made voting much more difficult for many people, including lots of minorities. For example, Texas has a countywide system for early voting, meaning that you can vote at any voting site.the new law requires that counties with more than a million population must now use a formula based on registrations to determine the number of voting sites in the county. I remember a story from 2020 of a nurse who finally got to vote when Houston had one day with 24-hour voting. With the Covid crisis, she was working so many hours that the polls were never open when she was off work until that one day. I imagine there are many poor people who work two jobs, going directly from one to the other, that also makes it difficult to vote.
The intentional result of the new law is that the heavily Democratic counties like Harris, Travis, Dallas, Bexar, and El Paso will be allowed fewer voting sites, resulting in longer lines and probably discouraging workers who don’t have much time off work. Counties with a population under a million—the more rural and Republican counties—still follow the old, more relaxed rules that allow them to have adequate voting sites. Even under the old law, I stood in line for more than two hours to vote in 2016 (in Austin) and that was at a local grocery store. Every site was like that for most of every day of early voting. I remember reading that the lines on election day were even longer.
The new voting law has also made life difficult for those who vote by mail, and that will discourage voters—I’m hoping that part discourages Republican voters as well, though they changed the signature matching part to give partisan election workers more opportunity to throw out mail ballots. The old law required a mail ballot signature to be matched to a signature on file that was no more than six years old. The new law allows the use of any signature, and it is the choice of the election workers which file signature to use. Our signatures change over time, and this is any easy way to disqualify mail ballots from Democratic precincts.
The third and possibly really creepy change is for poll watchers. In the past poll watchers could observe, from a short distance, but they could not interfere either with voters or with election workers. The new law allows them to be next to voters and election workers, though they are not allowed to observe a person actually casting a vote. What is new is they, and only they, are allowed to record video of everything. So imagine some Republican poll watchers in Hispanic communities, dressed like Proud Boys in official-looking uniform style clothes, walking along the lines waiting to vote and then targeting certain people to record. Hispanic voters may be less aware of their rights and also less interested in challenging what they might see as authorities. Hispanic people here already are targeted and often followed by police just as black people are in many areas. Recording people in line will have a chilling effect on voting as some people will simply leave and not bother. You can bet that poll watchers in white Republican areas will not be recording anyone.
If we don’t vote Republicans out of office in 2022, the right-wing extremists will just continue turning the state into a hellhole for women and minorities.
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