Texas GOP leaders target state’s big city voters

TX  – Texas has been a one-party state for more than two decades now, and if the current Republican leaders have anything to say about it, a restrictive new election law will keep it that way by making it harder for people in the state’s big cities and counties to vote.

The proposed legislation makes no substantive changes in election procedures in suburban and rural counties where Republicans dominate.

The New York Times cited a Cost of Voting Index in an article published Saturday that cites Texas as the state with the most restrictive election laws. The Texas GOP is not acting alone. At a time when voting rights groups say modernizing election processes are key to increased citizen participation, an unprecedented number of proposed bills in red states aim to quash innovation and restrict how people can register and vote. The coordinated efforts come after a record voter turnout for the November 2020 election that cost the Republican party control of the White House and the U.S. Senate.

Turnout was spurred by a deeply divided electorate and by local election officials responding to the pandemic by expanding early voting days and hours, replacing precinct voting with countywide voting, and increasing access to mail-in ballots.

After former Vice President Joe Biden’s decisive win, President Donald Trump and his followers in the Republican party and in right-wing media launched a nationwide disinformation campaign claiming widespread voter fraud in states Trump lost.

No evidence of voter fraud significant enough to affect the outcome in any of those states was produced by Trump or his supporters. Federal and state courts across the land and, eventually, Congress uniformly rejected such claims. Still, the fraud and conspiracy charges led a pro-Trump mob to violently storm the U.S. Capitol. Even now, more than five months after the election, conservative cable news personalities and some GOP officeholders cling to the phony election fraud narrative.