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Texas Republicans are working to shake up things in Houston by changing the voting process. Republican lawmakers introduced two dozen bills to suppress votes.
“We must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Gov. Greg Abbott said.
The bills will disable counties from sending absentee ballots to people who did not ask for them, limit voting hours, require faster purges to voter rolls, and make it easier to challenge signatures on the ballots. According to CNN, Harris County, Texas’ largest county, allowed early voting locations to open 24 hours.
“There’s really one thing all of us can and should agree upon, and that is we must have trust and confidence in our elections,” Abbott said. “One way to do that is to make sure that we reduce the potential for voter fraud.”
After President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to overturn the results after Trump accused the states of fraud.
“It’s part of a big lie,” Lina Hidalgo, Harris County’s chief executive, said. “It’s part of the intimidation, the confusion, the antics that (the Republican Party) has engaged in for so many generations that culminated in President Trump asking people to overturn the election.”
Hidalgo believes that the bills are bad for both Democrats and the Republicans.
“What they’re doing is filing bills that are essentially a poll tax that weaponize the election system against our own voters,” Hidalgo said. “Obviously, these Republicans are hoping their work is going to disenfranchise mostly Democrats. But the truth of the matter is, it’s going to disenfranchise both parties. And what they’re proposing is absolutely tragic and reminiscent of the worst of what we’ve seen in Texas and across the South since Reconstruction.”
