Voter suppression in Texas is alive and well. What is its past and what is its potential future? Myrna Pérez examines these questions in an article published in Brennan Center for Justice. Here is an excerpt:

All Texans deserve a free, fair, and accessible elections system. And even though Texas politicians have been hard at work for years to build barriers to the ballot, voters have shown they won’t be stopped: Texans registered and voted in record numbers in 2020.

But while participation should be welcome in a democracy, Republican politicians in Texas are hard at work erecting obstacles to the vote, introducing a slew of bills introduced in the Texas legislature, including an omnibus voter suppression bill called S.B. 7. Legislators are relying on the dangerous, debunked myth of voter fraud to push for these restrictive bills. If the facts tell us anything, Texas politicians would do best to act reasonably instead: stop the alarmism and respect Texans’ access to the ballot.

Many of the proposed policies would interfere with the vote and are steps in the wrong direction. They range from restrictions on voter registration to tightening eligibility on absentee voting — a particularly noteworthy turn of events given that Texas is already more restrictive with those two things than most of the states in the country. And they are not really masking their intentions. For example, last fall, Harris County, home to Houston, offered the state’s first-ever 24-hour voting sites. But S.B. 1115 would keep jurisdictions from offering expanded hours for voting. S.B. 1113, on the other hand, punishes election officials if they do not purge voter rolls aggressively enough. Again, a step in the wrong direction given Texas’s past history with sloppy purges that disenfranchise eligible voters. For its part, H.B. 6 would limit the ability of election workers to protect voters against illegal disruption and harassment by “watchers.”

Read the full article here.