Election integrity is a top legislative priority for the Texas GOP and the only one also designated an emergency item by Gov. Abbott.
Just ahead of this week’s deadline, Texas lawmakers in both chambers filed two big bills addressing election integrity, one of the key priorities for the legislative session.
The highly anticipated omnibus bills, House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7, feature long lists of election procedures and ballot security measures identified by advocates as needed reforms to improve voting reliability and voter confidence—including a curb on mail-ballot vote harvesters.
SB 7, introduced Thursday and passed by the Senate last night, is authored by State Sen. Brian Hughes (R–Mineola), along with 12 fellow Republican senators. Hughes chairs the Senate State Affairs Committee, which hears election-related bills in the upper chamber.
Hughes’ bill addresses a range of election issues, including voter registration and voter roll maintenance, voting by mail procedures, security and oversight at polling places and counting stations, and civil penalties for election code violations.
The bill requires counties to start using “auditable voting systems” that produce a paper audit trail by 2026, allows live-streamed video of central count areas, and prohibits “drive-thru” voting (a practice invented last year by Harris County’s Democrat election chief that’s not allowed for in Texas Election Code).
It also limits private donations to county election administrators to $1,000, unless the Texas Secretary of State’s office approves more. House Bill 2283 by State Rep. Phil King (R–Weatherford) would ban all private funding of election offices. In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions to select local election offices, including in Democrat-controlled Dallas and Harris counties.
(Full story here.)
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