Texas Republicans unveil sweeping voting restrictions bill – By Grace Segers (CBS News) / May 30 2021
Texas Republican state legislators on Saturday unveiled a sweeping voting restrictions bill amid efforts by Republican-led states to overhaul election laws in the wake of former President Trump’s electoral loss.
The bill, S.B. 7, includes several controversial provisions that critics say would disproportionately affect poor and minority voters. It also specifically targets voting practices employed this past year in Harris County, which includes Houston, by banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting. Those practices were used by 140,000 voters in 2020.
S.B. 7 makes it a state jail felony for local officials to attempt to send mail-in ballot applications to voters who did not request them, a practice Harris County employed in 2020. The bill also limits early voting and implements more restrictions on absentee voting, including adding more identification requirements for those who wish to vote-by-mail.
President Biden condemned the bill in a statement, calling it “part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year—and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans.”
