The sleight-of-hand from Republican bullshit artists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a growing problem.
So, where are we suppressing votes on Tuesday? Well, Georgia, of course, but it’s clear that the Republicans in the Texas legislature have looked over at Georgia and saw the bandwagon heading for the horizon. From the Texas Tribune:
At a press conference in Houston, Abbott served up the opening salvo in the Texas GOP’s legislative response to the 2020 election and its push to further restrict voting by taking aim at local election officials in the state’s most populous and Democratically controlled county. The governor specifically criticized officials in Harris County for attempting to send applications to vote by mail to every registered voter and their bid to set up widespread drive-thru voting, teeing up his support for legislation that would prohibit both initiatives in future elections. “Whether it’s the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Abbott said on Monday. Harris County planned to send out applications to request a mail-in ballot, not the actual ballots.
Remember when that federal judge down in North Carolina said that state’s new election laws targeted minority voters with “almost surgical precision”? Well, the new Texas effort targets Harris County—and its minority populations—with the same kind of deadly accuracy.
Harris County officials quickly fired back at Republicans’ proposals in their own press conference. “These kinds of attempts to confuse, to intimidate, to suppress are a continuation of policies we’ve seen in this state since Reconstruction,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. “It is a continuation as well of the big lie that’s being peddled by some far-right elements that the election in 2020 was somehow not true and should be overturned.”