SB 9′s crackdown on Texas voters

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By American-Statesman Editorial Board
Posted May 17, 2019 at 5:01 PM
Updated May 18, 2019 at 9:54 AM

In-person voter fraud is so rare that experts say a person is more likely to get struck by lightning than to misrepresent themselves at the polls. Among more than 1 billion ballots cast across the U.S. from 2000 to 2014, a major study found just 31 credible instances of voter fraud ...

SB 9 boosts the penalties for anyone who provides false information on a voter registration application or votes when they’re not eligible to do so — errors that are more likely to arise from honest mistakes than some plot to steal an election. But even that distinction would not carry weight with the courts: SB 9 would remove the requirement for a court to consider the intent of someone found to have broken election law. That means voters could face a felony charge, with potential jail time and a fine of up to $10,000, even for an innocent mixup ...

SB 9 also, inexplicably, treats disabled voters and those who help them with suspicion. A disabled voter who brings a trusted friend or caretaker to help them vote deserves the same privacy at the booth as anyone else. Instead, SB 9 would allow partisan poll watchers to examine those voters’ ballots before they are submitted to determine whether they were filled out “in accordance with the voter’s wishes.”

Additionally, a person who drives at least three non-relatives to a polling place for curbside voting — a convenience that makes it easier for elderly or disabled people to vote — must sign an affidavit swearing those voters are physically unable to make it inside the building. If these are lawfully registered voters, what difference does it make how they cast their ballots? Why must they or their drivers be made to explain themselves? ...

https://www.statesman.com/opinion/20190517/editorial-fear-not-facts-driving-sb-9s-crackdown-on-voters

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1. Voter suppression shouldn't be downplayed

By Marc Veasey
May 17, 2019

It is important that responsible public officials, and the media, push past the natural instinct to use soft words and indirect descriptions to discuss the type of straight-up voter suppression we are seeing in Texas. Discrimination wrapped in a false rationale and camouflaged by calm demeanor is no less wrong, no less immoral, than overt discrimination delivered with insults and epithets.

Every redistricting plan adopted by the Texas Republican majority in 2011 — Congress, state Senate and state House — was ruled to have violated the law and to have been adopted with discriminatory intent. The Texas Voter ID law adopted in 2011 was ruled to be intentionally discriminatory and the equivalent of a modern-day poll tax.

Political leaders who engage in vote suppression and discrimination don’t wave arms and hurl invectives while proposing and enacting laws to strip away voting rights. They carefully set up a false calculated rationale, and then calmly employ discriminatory laws and enforcement to solve a problem fabricated from the outset. They make voting seem difficult and risky to those citizens they see as a political threat.

We’ve seen this play out in Texas for nearly 20 years. As our population has become more diverse with Latinos, African Americans, Asians and other groups of Texans now outnumbering Anglos, the Republicans in power have seen a threat rather than an opportunity ...

https://www.tribtalk.org/2019/05/17/straight-up-voter-suppression-shouldnt-be-downplayed/

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2. When Texas lawmakers talk about 'election security'

May 17, 2019
Updated May 17, 2019
Ross Ramsey

... with just a few days remaining in this regular legislative session, election law is the order of the day in the form of Senate Bill 9, a bit of lawmaking that’s supposed to make Texas elections more secure.

The current version of this bill doesn’t even do what it set out to do: attach paper trails to ballots to make them more secure. Now, its opponents believe the effect of the current draft would be to suppress votes, particularly among new citizens, poorer ones and those with disabilities. You can get the sense of this debate by knowing that every vote so far has pitted Democrats and Republicans against one another. For instance, the House Elections Committee, a panel with five Republicans and four Democrats, had to postpone its vote for hours until state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, could get to the Capitol. Without her in the room, the vote was 4-4 – not enough to get the legislation out of committee ...

Republicans want this and Democrats don’t.

And that it has everything to do with the elections .. every other November. And we all know from the most recent results that those elections were closer in 2018 than in the years before ...

https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/opinion/analysis-when-texas-lawmakers-talk-about-election-security-trust-but/article_aac24d4e-78bb-11e9-8ff2-63800d8a46b7.html

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3. Poised to Make Voting 'Harder, Scarier and More Confusing'

by Michael Barajas
Fri, May 17, 2019 at 11:39 am CST

... While Republican supporters frame SB 9 as an “election integrity” bill, a coalition of civil rights groups call it a “dangerous new assault on voting rights in Texas.”

The passage Friday comes days after more than a 200 people registered opposition against the bill in a public hearing ...

County elections administrators who testified against SB 9 Wednesday argued that certain provisions criminalizing election workers for making simple mistakes would make it harder to staff polling places. Advocates for Texans with disabilities say they oppose the bill because it imposes strict rules that would make it more difficult to get assistance at the polls. They also worry the bill infringes on the rights of Texans with disabilities in other ways: the version of SB 9 passed by the Senate last month would allow election workers to watch someone vote and examine their ballot if they’re assisted by anyone who isn’t a relative ...

During Wednesday’s committee hearing, state Representative Rafael Anchía, a Dallas Democrat who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, tied the legislation to Texas’ long history of voter suppression, including numerous federal court findings over the past decade that Texas lawmakers intentionally discriminated against minority voters. Anchía also cited the botched voter purge that kicked off this year’s legislative session, a GOP-driven effort that wrongly targeted tens of thousands of naturalized citizen voters ...

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-republicans-poised-to-make-voting-harder-scarier-and-more-confusing/

[Gothmog]

4. From the Texas state Democratic Party

Link to tweet

[X_Digger]

5. +1 n/t

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6. +!