1 year ago
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Texas Republicans are ramping up their long-running campaign to make voting more difficult with a new barrage of legislation that specifically singles out the state's largest county—which just so happens to reliably vote Democratic.
Multiple GOP bills target Harris County, which is home to Houston and 4.7 million people, making it both Texas' most populous county and the third-largest in the nation. Once a Republican bastion, Harris County has swung sharply to the left during the Trump era, thanks to its highly diverse and relatively well-educated electorate. In 2020, it backed Joe Biden by a 56-43 margin, and Democrats also took over the county government in 2018, with rising star Lina Hidalgo securing a second term as Harris' top official just last year.
Republicans, however, want to try to turn back the clock. One of the GOP's bills, first reported by Talking Points Memo, would empower Republican Secretary of State Jane Nelson to invalidate a county's election results and order a do-over if she "has good cause to believe"—not necessarily hard proof—that at least 2% of the county's polling places "ran out of usable ballots during voting hours" and "did not receive supplemental ballots." This vaguely worded provision would, as one voting rights advocate put, set "really low thresholds'' for overturning election results.
What makes this proposal so egregious is that the bill's very own text says it only applies to counties with a population of 2.7 million or more. Why such an oddly specific number? Texas' second-biggest county, Dallas, has a population of 2.6 million, according to the most recent Census Bureau estimates. The law would therefore cover Harris County and only Harris County.
