Texas Republicans Targeting Voting Access Find Their Bull's-Eye: Cities

[douglas9]

HOUSTON — Voting in the 2020 election presented Zoe Douglas with a difficult choice: As a therapist meeting with patients over Zoom late into the evening, she just wasn’t able to wrap up before polls closed during early voting.

Then Harris County introduced 24-hour voting for a single day. At 11 p.m. on the Friday before the election, Ms. Douglas joined fast-food workers, nurses, construction workers, night owls and other late-shift workers at NRG Arena, one of eight 24-hour voting sites in the county, where more than 10,000 people cast their ballots in a single night.

“I can distinctly remember people still in their uniforms — you could tell they just got off of work, or maybe they’re going to work; a very diverse mix,” said Ms. Douglas, 27, a Houston native.

Twenty-four-hour voting was one of a host of options Harris County introduced to help residents cast ballots, along with drive-through voting and proactively mailing out ballot applications. The new alternatives, tailored to a diverse work force struggling amid a pandemic in Texas’ largest county, helped increase turnout by nearly 10 percent compared with 2016; nearly 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots, and a task force found that there was no evidence of any fraud.



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/us/politics/texas-republicans-voting.html

[gab13by13]

1. Sure, voter disenfranchisement is going to hurt,

but people don't realize that 2020 was a census year, don't realize that means that Republicans can win back the House simply by redistricting. I know about redistricting because I live in a district in Pa. where a Republican, no matter how bad he or she is, is guaranteed to win. Do all of the get out the vote by all means but the horse may already be out of the barn.

Also, I hear next to no talk about redistricting and what can be done about it.

[myccrider]

2. H.R. 1 is supposed to be a lot of the cure.

One provision is that redistricting must be done by an independent commission, not the partisan legislature.

Here’s an explanation of how those commissions would work:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/five-ways-hr-1-would-transform-redistricting

But the only way for it to pass in the Senate is to change the filibuster rule.