Controversial Election Bill Passes Texas Legislature. Here’s What’s In It.

Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), left, and Lieutenant Dan Patrick celebrate the passing of Senate Bill 1, an overhaul of the Texas Election Code.

A bill that prompted a weeks-long Democratic walkout from the Texas House of Representatives in July and August has passed the legislature.

Republican bill author Bryan Hughes, a senator from the Tyler area, says the bill will make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat,” while Democrats argue that it restricts access to the polls in ways that will limit democratic participation.

The House passed the bill last Friday, after which the two chambers ironed out their differences and took final votes yesterday. The governor has indicated that he will sign it.

The new law, known as Senate Bill 1 or by its formal name, the Election Integrity Protection Act of 2021, cleared the Senate by a final vote of 18–11 and the House by a vote of 80–41. Some Democrats continued to boycott the chamber in protest of the bill.

Much of the bill is substantively the same as it was in July, but some provisions were softened or removed-a fact that Democrats pointed to as vindication for their walkout. For example, the approved version of the bill removes a section about challenging elections in court and the conditions under which a judge can overturn an election.

The 76-page bill contains the following key provisions:

• Expands early voting hours from eight hours to nine hours but restricts early voting hours from 6 am to 10 pm.
• Bans local officials from soliciting applications to vote by mail.
• Allows a voter who has moved to a new county to update his/her registration digitally rather than having to apply for a new registration from the new county in which he/she resides.
• Ensures swift cancellation of the registration in the old county.
• Requires the secretary of state to run monthly scans comparing the state’s voter registration database with Department of Public Safety citizenship status information.
• Sets civil penalties for counties not in compliance with state voter registration rules.
• Enhances the criminal penalty for a paid canvasser who encourages a person to make a false statement on a voter registration application, from a Class A misdemeanor to a state jail felony.
• Requires counties to provide information about registration attempts by ineligible voters to the attorney general and secretary of state.
• Bans drive-through voting except when the voter is “physically unable to enter the polling place without personal assistance or likelihood of injuring the voter’s health.”
• Establishes or modifies certain internal controls for election judges at polling places.
• Requires vote counting stations in large counties (250,000+) to have software that logs all electronic inputs/activity and to deliver logs of that activity to the secretary of state after the election.
• Requires counties with a population of 100,000 or more to have video surveillance in vote counting areas and areas where ballots are stored, available to the public via livestream.
• Establishes a system of partly randomized audits of counties (with large counties more frequently subject to audit).
• Allows someone to become a poll watcher simply by taking an online course, “at any time, without a requirement for prior registration,” and makes it a crime for an election officer to turn away a poll watcher who has completed that course.
• Prohibits election officials from removing a poll watcher for a violation of the election code unless they first give the watcher a warning that the poll watcher’s conduct violates the law.
• Allows poll watchers to sit or stand near enough to election officials to see and hear any activity in the polling station, except when a voter is actually preparing a ballot or being assisted by a person of the voter’s choice.
• Gives voters with a defective mail-in ballot the opportunity to correct the defect.
• Requires a person assisting a disabled voter, other than an election officer, to fill out a form stating their relationship to the voter.
• Requires judges to inform felony defendants upon conviction how it will impact their right to vote.

Originally published at https://www.honestaustin.com on September 1, 2021.