Chuck DeVore is the vice president of national initiatives at the Foundation. He writes about the economy and how energy, tax and regulatory policies influence general prosperity, and he frequently appears on Fox News. He also guides the Foundation’s growing national work in criminal justice reform. He authored the book The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America.
As in Georgia, Florida, and other states, the Texas legislature is working to strengthen the state’s election law against the left’s largely successful 2020 effort to subvert it. Texas last passed an election code omnibus bill in 2017 (I testified in favor of the bill). That bill, as with 2021’s efforts, aimed to increase safeguards...
The U.S. Census Bureau released its once-in-a-decade national census on April 26. Most of the discussion about the census has focused on states losing or gaining seats in the U.S. House, a process known as reapportionment. For the 2022 midterms, seven states will be down one member of the House: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York,...
How rights are viewed—individual or collective—explains today’s sharp disagreement over the rules for running elections, both in Congress and in states considering election integrity bills. Democrats—specifically the dominant extremist variety—view rights through the collective lens of race. Critical race theory (CRT), based in Marxism, is essential to understanding their objectives. CRT holds that personage is...
The Texas State Senate on Wednesday approved Senate Bill 1509, by Sen. Brandon Creighton, a key elections bill that protects the integrity of mail-in ballots. After passing the Senate 19-12, the bill now heads to the House. The bill addresses the fact that mail-in ballots can be too easily exploited by ballot traffickers in Texas....
The U.S. Census Bureau released the data from its once-in-a-decade population count on Monday afternoon, resulting in the shift of some of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives between states—a process called reapportionment. The results were delayed by a battle in the federal courts over whether to count people illegally in the U.S. for purposes of how many members of Congress each state gets, with the...
U.S. Congressman Chip Roy has carefully documented the need for election integrity reforms in Texas, pushing back on the claim that legislation such as House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7 are “new Jim Crow” efforts to suppress votes. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has obtained an advance copy of that document. “Voter fraud is...
When the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid. This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the...
When Texas voters walk into a polling place, the process is clear; election workers check them in, comparing their photo IDs to the county voter rolls. It takes seconds, but it adds a level of security to our election that Texans truly value. And Texans want the same security for their mail-in ballots; better than...
When people vote – with a moving van or a U-Haul truck – they vote for lower taxes and smaller government. That’s the conclusion from comparing a new report on freedom at the state level with the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data. Over the course of a year, a net of 788,381 people moved to Florida, New Hampshire, Tennessee,...
From 2012 to 2020, mail-in ballot use in Texas grew from 204,000 to about 1 million, a quintupling of mailed votes. This suggests Texas is moving from an excuse-required to vote by mail state to a de facto vote-by-mail state, all without a change in the state’s election code. Why does this matter? Because voting...
The government response to COVID-19 has mostly been a failure. Theatric, yes—see New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy. Symbolic, yes. But there is no evidence shutdowns did anything but deepen the economic suffering, increase suicides, and prevent lifesaving medical tests and treatments. With the exception of former President Trump’s effort to speed research, approval, and...
See the second page of ERCOT’s latest reliability assessment. Under the top table describing the reserve margins, they have a table labelled “Range of Potential Risks.” Something between the 4th and 5th columns is what happened this week. Add 2,000 MW of demand above ERCOT’s adjustment here (they assumed a record of 67,200 MW) and 10,000...