The Republican bills are the first new pieces of voting legislation to be introduced by a state legislature since the Supreme Court’s decision last week to uphold voting restrictions in Arizona, a ruling that gave states greater latitude to enact voting limits.
Texas follows several other major battleground states controlled by Republicans that have passed substantial overhauls of their election laws and enacted new voting restrictions this year. Since January, at least 22 bills to make voting more difficult have been signed into law in 14 states, part of a broad, Republican-led push after the 2020 election to rein in voting access.
Since the failed attempt to pass the legislation during the spring session, Republican leaders in the Legislature have signaled an accelerated schedule for the voting bills in the special session. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who also serves as president of the Senate in Texas, set a committee hearing on that chamber’s bill for Saturday.
Though the special session of the Legislature will take place in a condensed 30-day period, the legislative process remains the same, with the bills needing to wind their way through each chamber in the hopes that one of the two can be agreed upon. If neither chamber can agree on a bill, then it is likely to go to a conference committee, where the final details of the legislation would be hashed out behind closed doors by a select panel of lawmakers.
In a possible attempt to appease some Democrats, the House bill includes two provisions that are liberal priorities: one for curing rejected absentee ballots and another that would make it no longer a crime to file a provisional ballot from a voter who was unknowingly ineligible to vote (known as the Crystal Mason provision, after a Texas voter who was sentenced to five years in prison for voting provisionally in 2016 when she was on supervised release for a federal conviction). The Senate version also includes a curing provision.