While lawmakers in Austin continue to spar over an omnibus voting bill that would tighten voter restrictions, other voting laws are set to take effect Sept. 1.
Andrew Schneider
Houston Public Media
Much of the drama over this summer's special legislative sessions has focused on Gov. Greg Abbott's priority elections bill, which spurred a quorum-breaking walkout from Texas Democrats that ended this week.
Overshadowed by the political battle in Austin: the Texas Legislature did in fact pass several bills on voting during the regular session. And only a few of the new voting laws come without controversy.
Some of the more controversial bills were spearheaded by Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, who before being elected in 2014 served as Harris County's Tax Assessor-Collector, which at the time was the the county's voter registrar.
Bettencourt has remained outspoken about elections ever since, and this past March, he filed seven proposals he termed "election integrity bills.”
Those include Senate Bill 1111, which bans Texas voters from registering using a post office box as their address.
Bettencourt's argument: no one lives in a two-by-three-inch P.O. Box.
“We have 4,800 people registered at private UPS boxes around the county, and that’s certainly enough to influence the outcome of local legislative races or district races of all types," Bettencourt said.
SB 1111 is one of three Bettencourt bills that passed and will take effect Sept. 1 among more than 650 new state laws.
Another new Bettencourt law going into effect: SB 1113, which enables the Secretary of State to deny voter registrars funds if they fail to remove certain individuals from the rolls. If you don’t work, he argued, you shouldn't get paid.
The laws’ effective date come as Texas Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature spar over an omnibus elections bill that would add new voting restrictions in the state. The GOP-sponsored bill would ban drive-thru and 24-hour voting — both measures that Harris County enacted in the 2020 election to expand voter access during the COVID-19 pandemic — and make mail-in voting more difficult, among other things.
Texas House Democrats broke quorum to end the regular session in May, and then did so again last month to derail the first special session, after criticizing the omnibus bill — SB 1 — as an attempt at voter suppression.
Democrats again broke quorum earlier this month to block the bill’s passage in a second special session, but some have since returned, making its passage more likely.
Not all of the voting bills have been controversial. Bettencourt's third law, SB 1116, is designed to increase transparency on local governments' websites, making election details easier to find. It passed with bipartisan support, sponsored in the House by Democratic state Rep. John Bucy of Austin.
But Bettencourt's other measures have aroused some fierce opposition by local officials and civil rights advocates. His successor as Harris County's voter registrar, Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria, said his argument about no one physically living inside a P.O. Box misses the point.
"It both assumes that voters are liars, assumes that voters all have a typical situation of living at, you know, a home with four walls and a door, and then on top of that creates this very vague idea of who is supposed to get kicked off (the voter rolls) and how they get kicked off," Longoria said.
SB 1111 specifically discriminates against minority and younger voters, Longoria argued. The Latino civil rights organization LULAC is currently suing Harris County over its enforcement.
The Harris County official accused her predecessor of attempting to suppress the vote by changing the law so that it would require current voter registrars to do things he was not allowed to do when he held the office. After the 2008 elections, Democrats sued Bettencourt for rejecting voter applications. That suit was eventually settled.
“Ostensibly, he thought maybe some of them lived at addresses that weren’t really home addresses,” Longoria said. “So, he removed people from the voter rolls illegally.
SB 1113 troubles voting rights advocates for a similar reason. It harkens back to a failed 2019 effort by then-Texas Secretary of State David Whitley to purge the voter rolls of more than 90,000 alleged noncitizens.
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