Texas Senate Passes New Restrictive Voting Bill

The Texas Senate early in the morning on Thursday passed a package of election bills that would impose further restrictions on voting in the state.

The final version of Senate Bill 7 is not yet online for review, but the original bill banned overnight early voting hours and early voting behind the wheel, while limiting how Election officials handle postal voting.

The bill underwent hours of debate and “dozens” of proposed amendments before it was passed, according to the bill’s author, Republican Senator Bryan Hughes.

“This bill aims to make the vote easy and difficult to cheat,” he said in a social media video posted after 3 a.m. in Austin.

The bill is now heading to the Texas House of Representatives, which is considering its own set of omnibus restrictions, Bill 6, later Thursday. The Texas legislature leads the nation in restrictive ballot bills, according to the Brennan Center for Justice; 49 bills have been introduced to add restrictions on access to the ballot boxes.

Advocates criticized the Senate bill as unnecessary and a major threat to voting rights.

“SB 7 is the most dangerous threat to voting rights that we have seen in years,” Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement. “The greatest threats to electoral integrity are codified racist attacks on voters, unequal access to the ballot box and harassment of partisan observers who would seek to disrupt safe and fair elections.”

In an interview with NBC News last month, Hughes said the 2020 election had heightened interest in legislation Texas lawmakers already wanted to pass.

“It was already underway, but the 2020 election was so in the national spotlight, and so many people have questions, so many people have concerns,” he told NBC News last week. “I would say it raised the profile of the problem.”

Former President Donald Trump’s stolen election lie has inspired an avalanche of election-related bills across the country, as GOP lawmakers across the country seek to add restrictions on postal voting and voting. other electoral practices which they believe are necessary to improve public confidence in the results. Clearly, the 2020 election was safe and the results accurate. Trump’s own attorney general William Barr said there was no evidence of widespread electoral fraud and that the president’s legal efforts to overturn the results failed in courtrooms across the country.