This analysis by Sean Morales-Doyle appears in Brennan Center for Justice. Here is an excerpt:
On Tuesday afternoon, Senate Bill 1, a dangerous and sweeping voter restriction bill, passed both houses of the Texas Legislature. This piece of legislation makes it harder for voters who face language access barriers or who have disabilities to get help casting their ballots, restricts election officials’ and judges’ abilities to stop harassment from poll watchers, and bans 24-hour and drive-thru voting, among other measures.
Its supporters claim that S.B. 1 is meant to stop voter fraud. It’s the very same voter fraud that Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours looking for evidence of, only to find 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms in a pool of nearly 17 million registered voters. Despite the governor’s and attorney general’s best efforts to claim otherwise, Texans voted in an election described by the secretary of state’s office as “smooth and secure.” In other words, the restrictions to voting introduced in S.B. 1 are as pointless as they are unlawful.
That’s why the Brennan Center for Justice and co-counsel — the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Harris County Attorney’s Office, and the law firms of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in Dallas and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP in New York — filed a lawsuit today against the state of Texas in federal district court. We’re demanding that it be stopped from enforcing S.B. 1’s burdens on voting. We assert that the bill violates the First, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Section 2 and Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Read the full article here.
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