Here they come to do what they do.
A federal appeals court has temporarily reinstated portions of Texas’ 2021 voting law regulating ballot handling, ruling that a judge’s previous decision to strike certain rules came too close to the 2024 election.
The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, means the provisions aimed at preventing “vote harvesting” will stay in effect through at least Nov. 5, and that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is cleared to investigate into the practice.
Judge James Ho, who authored the decision, wrote that the state law in question had “been on the books for over three years” when U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez struck down the provisions for being overly vague. Rodriguez’s decision came after some counties had already mailed out absentee ballots, Ho noted.
See here for the background. This only affects the first ruling relating to the big lawsuit against the omnibus voter suppression law, it does not touch the more recent ruling that blocked other parts of it. I assume there’s an appeal filed for that as well, but it took two weeks for a ruling on this one, so if we’re on a similar timeline then a similar ruling would have a modest effect. I’ll keep an eye out for it.