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Among the hundred people who took part in the first day of a Texas voting rights march, held after the Selma civil rights marches in Montgomery, Alabama, was 80-year-old music superstar Tejano. , better known by her stage name, Little Joe.
Little Joe, whose full name is José María de León Hernández, has advocated for equality for much of his more than six decades in entertainment. He joined protests for agricultural workers and was active in the civil rights protests of the Chicano movement.
On Wednesday, he angrily denounced the GOP’s attempt to impose a new set of rules on Texans who want to vote.
“You know Texas is the most racist state in America, and it’s only getting worse,” Hernández, multiple-time Grammy Award-winner, said after completing the first leg of the Fourth March. days in Georgetown, Texas. “Racist Republicans just don’t want to let go of the slave master mentality.”
Not what was most heartbreaking was not seeing more outrage on the part of Latinos over the latest attempt to tighten up voting, he said.
“We suffer from the illusion of inclusion. We believe that we are part of something that is denied to us, ”said Hernández.
The clash over the latest voting changes proposed by the Texas GOP spread from Austin to Washington after Democrats, outnumbered in the state legislature, withdrew from the last legislative session to block the adoption of GOP voting changes.
They pleaded their case from the nation’s capital under threat of arrest upon their return to Texas.
Some reject accusations of racism in proposed laws, but the Texas GOP’s latest attempt to reconfigure how, when and where Texans can vote is continued just as Latinos are set to overtake white numbers in the state .
When the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 1975, Latinos made up about 22% of the population and made up about 15% of the vote in Texas, said Cal Jillson, professor of political science at Southern Methodist University and author of “Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State.”
Today, about 40 percent of Texas’ population is Latino, almost as many as whites, who are around 41 percent. Latinos are believed to hold 20-25% of all votes now.
The voting bills proposed by the GOP include a ban on drive-thru voting and additional requirements over the existing voter identification law. They would ban local authorities from sending mail-in ballot requests and require the Texas Secretary of State to check the voting lists for non-citizens on a monthly basis.
“The reality is that this is bad policy, and given the size of the Latino electorate and the number of Latinos who must register and the ability to navigate the electoral process itself, the greatest impact will be. on Latinos, ”said Clarissa Martínez. -de-Castro, vice president of Latin American defense group UnidosUS, citing figures from America’s Election Eve poll.
Additionally, the GOP’s efforts come as more Latinos have become eligible to vote and after an acceleration in the registration and turnout of Latino voters over the past two election cycles.
“If you look at the last presidential elections and you’re a Republican you can say that in 2016 80% of Latinos voted for Democrats and in 2020 it was 69% so I should try to compete for that support of the voters “, Martínez- dit de-Castro.
“It’s laughable that party candidates get frustrated when they have to fight for the voters. That’s exactly what they have to do, but you see all these different shenanigans, whether it’s tinkering with our electoral or gerrymandering system, ”she said.
Texas has a long history of discrimination in voting rights, including when Democrats were in power. It was so blind – white primaries, ballot taxes, English literacy tests, annual voter registration, purges of voter lists – that the state had to get federal approval for the electoral changes until the Supreme Court overturned the law on voting rights in 2013.
The state was found to violate the voting rights law “every decade since the law was passed,” State Representative Nicole Collier, a Democrat who represents Fort Worth, told the committee on Thursday. of the United States House on Surveillance and Reform.
There is a loud rejection by Republicans against claims that their voting proposals are racist.
The party said the goal was to restore the integrity of the state’s electoral system. Republicans have won every elected office statewide since 1994 and have controlled the Legislature since 2003.
“The proposed changes in Texas protect the voting rights of all voters, including Latinos, by ensuring that every vote is legally cast and counted,” Matt Rinaldi, president of the state Republican Party, said in a statement. sent by email.
Rinaldi said people want to know their votes are safe and counted, regardless of their race or ethnicity. “We are convinced that the Republicans’ share of Latino votes will continue to increase over time,” he said.
In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling upholding electoral restrictions in Arizona, Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said bringing in new voting restriction proposals or laws as preventing fraud amplifies Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen and “calls into question the legitimacy of a dramatically increasing Latin American vote in the United States.”
Whites still hold about 60% of the vote in Texas, Jillson said. That’s down about 80 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, he said.
“The Texas electoral system has always been open to whites, especially economically comfortable whites, and closed to everyone,” he said.
While elections were tightly closed to blacks during the Jim Crow era, they were less so against Hispanics, who were seen as an electorate run by leaders of the Latin American community in conjunction with white conservatives, a he declared.
The growth of the Latino electorate in Texas is one of the reasons the GOP is pushing the latest changes – “a big one,” Jillson said.
Federal court rulings have also been at play, removing limits on changes in voting and election systems, including the oversight Texas has been subjected to since 1975, he said.
The Supreme Court’s foreclosure of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 “freed Texas and other Red State lawmakers and governors to say we can craft whatever voting regulations and election laws we want, even though they have a disparate impact, a greater impact, on people of color. than Anglos, ”he said.
Election restrictions can affect both sides
During the years that Republicans controlled the state government of Texas, the number of Latinos who voted in the presidential and midterm elections rose from 740,000 in November 1994 to 2.97 million last November, based on census estimates from the Community Population Survey.
About 5.6 million Latinos are eligible to vote in Texas, reports the Pew Research Center.
The Republican share of Latino votes has also increased. For a 2013 PolitiFact article, Mike Baselice, a Republican pollster from Texas, said that in 1982, Republicans running for statewide election attracted 12.5% of the Hispanic vote.
Now, Republican candidates have often been able to attract over 30 percent and sometimes over 40 percent of the Latin American vote. Last year’s exit polls reported that Trump won 41% of Latino votes.
Over the past two election cycles, there has been accelerated growth in enrollment and turnout for Latinos, Martínez-de-Castro said.
Jason Villalba, CEO and chairman of the board of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, said pressure from the Texas GOP for new voting rules was not about race but appealing to Republican primary voters and loyalty to Trump , which he called the “titular head of the party.”
“They want to see their governor, lieutenant governor stand in solidarity with him, to cover up the ‘big lie’ or the ‘steal the election’, to make sure that never happens in Texas,” said Villalba, a former Republican turned independent during Trump’s political rise.
Villalba said the GOP’s motivation to change election laws would unquestionably affect Latino voters and other groups, including Republicans.
“Republican primary voters will crawl on broken glass to vote, and their vote will certainly be recorded. But in general elections, it will hurt the [Republican] vote and [the vote of] people who could be Republicans, ”he said.
The legislation would curtail some electoral practices that have been used recently by Republicans, he said.
GOP candidates “relied a lot on mail-in ballots because we knew Republicans were going to be largely older and voted by ballot,” he said; Republican candidates would send cards that provided postal voting requests.
“We knew it was a huge source of votes for Republicans,” he said.
“Come and participate”
Protesters plan to conclude their marches on Saturday with a rally at the Texas Capitol. The events were organized by the Campaign of the Poor, led by Reverend William J. Barber II and former Representative Beto O’Rourke, who also marched.
O’Rourke and another former Democratic presidential candidate, Julián Castro, had planned to attend the rally with thousands of other people. Another artist from Texas, Willie Nelson, said Thursday he would host a concert at the rally.
Hernández was unable to walk for more than a day because of concerts already scheduled. He said he hoped others, especially Latinos, would take his place.
“I urge the raza to come out and participate. It is for our good, the good of our children, the state, the country ”, he declared. “If we lose more voting rights, everything else is secondary. “
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