Remember how the final version of SB7, the one that emerged from behind closed doors in conference committee, had a provision in it that would have made it a lot easier to overturn the result of an election via legal challenge? That was one such provision that had not been in previous versions of the bill. Well, apparently no one claims to know how it got there, and we are being promised that the next version of the omnibus voter suppression bill will not have it.
In a sweeping overhaul of Texas elections law that Republicans rushed toward approval in the waning hours of the legislative session, one provision stood out to critics as particularly alarming.
The hastily-added clause would have made it easy for a judge to overturn an election, even if there were only thin evidence of fraud. With former President Donald Trump’s historic efforts to nullify his November loss still fresh in their minds, Democrats singled out the measure as irresponsible.
“Just think about that — your election, YOUR election could be overturned without the other side being required to prove actual voter fraud,” said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Carrolton, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the Texas House. “The implications of this are unthinkable. To make matters worse, the provision was not in either the Senate or the House version of the bill.”
The bill never passed, dying at midnight on May 31 after the Democrats blocked a vote on it by walking out. Yet policy debates have given way to an even more basic question: Who added the “Overturning Elections” section to it?
One of the members of the conference committee that crafted the final version of the bill, state Rep. Travis Clardy, R-Nagodoches, says he doesn’t know. Other top Republicans who worked on the final draft of the legislation say they don’t know either.
What’s more, Clardy — and chief author Sen. Bryan Hughes — now denounces the measures related to overturning elections and says Republicans don’t plan to revive them in a future bill.
“There was zero appetite or intent or willingness to create some low bar where a single judge can overturn the results of an election,” Clardy said in an interview with Hearst Newspapers. “That would be horrendous policy, and it would never be healthy for the democracy.”
Democratic members say there is no way those provisions were inserted by mistake. They say they raised concerns about them with Republicans when there was time to spare for the bill to be revised.
The sections would have lowered the standard of proof to overturn an election from “clear and convincing” evidence to a “preponderance of the evidence” for many types of fraud allegations. And they gave judges the ability to void elections even if it couldn’t be demonstrated that fraudulent ballots made a difference in the outcome.
If the bill had passed, Texas would have been one of few states to have lowered the bar so much, opening the door to a flood of potential election challenges, election law experts said.
“If we deliberately design a system that says all you have to do is come up with a simple preponderance — that is, just barely more evidence than the other side — and we’re going to throw out the elections, when we have a whole gamut of election procedures in place that we justifiably expect to produce reliable results in the normal course, we’re really undermining that,” said Steven Huefner, professor of law at the Ohio State University.
[…]
State Rep. Nicole Collier, one of three Democrats on the conference committee and chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, wasn’t buying Republicans’ claims that the language was added by mistake.
“They had time to review it,” Collier said. “The fact that the conference report was signed on Saturday” — the day before it went to the House floor — “means that they had read it, and they approved it.”
Must have been another typo. Really need some better proofreaders, I guess.
This is, of course, all transparent bullshit. The bill was in conference committee for over ten days. Someone put that clause in there, whether anyone will admit to it or not. I will note again how the likes of Dan Patrick were patronizingly telling everyone who made any claim about how the initial version of SB7 would suppress votes to “read the bill”. Who’s not reading the bills now? Maybe if we’d had the time to hold public hearings on this bill, we might have avoided this little embarrassment as well.
And note again, for all of the whining and bitching and threatening to veto funding for legislative functions over the Democratic quorum breaking, the only reason this obvious threat to democracy, which now all of these Republicans agree was a bad idea and which they swear they never intended to include, is not about to be law in Texas is because Dems were able to use the processes available to them to kill that bill. I feel pretty confident saying that Greg Abbott would not put fixing that provision on the agenda in however many special sessions he calls. Republicans screwed this up, because they didn’t care about the niceties of legislating, they just wanted to get their win. You can thank the Dems for sparing us the fallout of their malign incompetence.
On a related topic (SB7 oddities) -I don’t understand the amendments to 87.041, concerning the signature committee work. These appear at about pp. 33-34 of the pdf.
The committee has to accept a ballot for which the signature on neither (i) the carrier envelope nor (ii) the bbm-application are determined to have been made by a person not the voter. 87.041(b)(2), as currently enacted.
SB7 would have created a rebuttable presumption that the signatures on the carrier envelope and on the bbm-application are those “signatures” of the voter. 87.041(d-1) as proposed.
But then proposed 87.041(e) would require the committee to ask DPS for signatures, and allows the committee to look at anything on file with county, to determine whether the signature on the carrier envelope and application were made by someone not the voter.
Why would that be necessary if the presumption applies? Did they just not put in language in (e) carving out cases where the presumption applies? Or does this mean that DPS signatures can rebut the presumption?
Does the presumption apply in 87.027? Weird how there is no mention of DPS in proposed 87.027 for exactly the same comparison – carrier envelope to bbm-application.
How do you have a rebuttable presumption in a non-judicial setting like the signature committee proceedings anyway? They can’t mean that it only applies in an AG proceeding for fraud against the voter, can they? Who rebuts?
I’m very confused by this, and it looks like they are setting up a situation ripe for making mistakes.
Would be thrilled if someone could explain all this to me
The signature on my drivers license bears only the slightest resemblance to my usual signature… something about trying to do it at an awkward angle with a stylus on a small pad with no place to rest the base of my hand. Same thing with credit cards.
I’ll admit I haven’t taken the time to read any version (my doc asks me to keep my blood pressure under control), but I wonder if voters receive any sort of notice and opportunity to validate a rejected signature.