The face of voter fraud in Texas is not Crystal Mason who voted provisionally, but illegally. She had not completed her terms of supervised release stemming from a 2011 federal tax fraud conviction. She is the exception who made a mistake, though it is still considered “harvesting” under the current definition. The real problem we...
To lead off its editorial railing against Senate Bill 7 and efforts to reform—or at least regularize—the rules for voting in Texas, the Houston Chronicle evokes the White Man’s Primary Association of Dimmit County. But like the editorial itself, there’s far less here than meets the eye. It’s true that in tiny Dimmit County in...
I don’t know how widespread voter fraud was in the last two presidential elections. But I do know that vulnerabilities exist in our election system that allow both sides to sow legitimate doubts about the results. For the sake of our democracy, this needs to stop. Thankfully, the vast majority of Texans agree. The key...
Growing up in one of the most politically active communities in Houston, I was taught from an early age that voting was our most important civic duty. My father would always say “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” In those days, people had a great deal of confidence in one another and our electoral...
As a first-generation American kid, the saying, “you only really appreciate something when it’s gone” was repeated to me ad nauseum and drilled into my brain by my parents, who were forced to flee their homeland of Cuba in 1960. I heard it at family gatherings as well, and when visitors came over. Hearing it...
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...
A recent Perryman Group study (paid for by the Texas Civil Rights Project, a left-wing group that advocates for insecure election practices) claims that Texas will lose more than $3 trillion and almost 7 million jobs over 25 years if the Legislature passes a bill to ensure more secure elections. But what does the one...
There’s a very telling subhead in the Dallas Morning News story on “backlash” to election protection laws: “If bills are viewed as discriminatory, Texas could lose NCAA and professional sporting events.” The Morning News isn’t wrong (about that, at least); it’s not about whether proposals such as Senate Bill 7 actually are discriminatory; it’s about...
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...
Everything that’s wrong with the H.R. 1 election takeover bill can be summed up with the propagandistic misnomer the Democrats have labeled it with—the “For the People Act.” It undermines the very right it purports to uphold, a citizen’s right to have a say in our representative democracy. Enabling fraudulent ballots to cancel out legitimate...
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted out a bold statement on Tuesday: “We don’t have voter fraud in Texas…” It was part of a longer tweet, which continued, “but we did have massive systemwide grid failure, statewide power outages, bursted water pipes, no water and high electricity bills. Um. Now I understand why some elected officials...
As a legislator, I believe that we must work to secure the right of every citizen to participate in guiding the direction of our government. When people do not have confidence in our electoral institutions—when political legitimacy is questioned—liberty is threatened. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the Texas Legislature this session to ensure that elections,...