The Democrats in Texas are trying to prevent Republican franchise reform. While the Republicans cite protection against electoral fraud as a motive, the Democrats see something completely different in the project – and are fighting hard.
The dispute over electoral reform in the US state of Texas has continued to escalate. Regional members of the Democratic Party launched a new boycott on Monday (local time) to prevent the Texas parliament from passing the reform: They traveled to the capital, Washington. Through the trip, the parliamentarians wanted to prevent the minimum number of MPs present for the session of the regional congress from being achieved.
The planned changes to the electoral law in Texas include a ban on so-called drive-in voting, a limitation of postal voting options and shorter opening times for polling stations. Election workers are also no longer allowed to send absentee ballots to voters who have not requested them. Accordingly, the Republicans are also planning to increase the requirements for voter identification for postal votes and to greatly expand the authority and autonomy of the party election observers.
Democrats see electoral reform as an attempt by Republicans, Afro-Americans and other non-white minorities to participate in elections. These social groups tend to vote Democrats rather than Republicans.
The Democrats wanted to prevent the Texas Parliament from whipping through “dangerous legislation that would trample on the freedom of choice for Texans,” said regional Democratic leader Chris Turner and several of his party colleagues in a joint statement. They appealed to Congress in Washington to swiftly legislate a “nationwide war on democracy” led by former President Donald Trump’s Republicans.
Democrats are a minority in Texas Parliament
According to, the Democrats can block Texas legislation for weeks if they don’t return to Texas by the end of the August session. In the long term, however, they could not prevent the electoral reform in view of the majority situation in Texas.
While President Joe Biden’s Democrats control Congress in Washington, they are in the minority in the Texas Parliament. However, in the absence of the democratic parliamentarians, the regional parliament cannot meet. The chairman of the Texas House of Representatives, Republican Dade Phelan, announced that his party would use “every available resource” to secure the quorum of MPs present.
Democrats see “attack on democracy”
The Texas Democrats had already boycotted a parliamentary session at the end of May in order to block the electoral reform. Biden plans to deliver a speech on suffrage in Philadelphia on Tuesday. The president had already denounced the planned reform in Texas as well as similar, already passed laws in the states of Florida and Georgia as an “attack on democracy”.
Since the presidential election last year, in which the Democrat Biden prevailed against the Republican incumbent Trump, the Republicans have been driving changes in the electoral law in the states they govern. They justify this with the alleged susceptibility of the previous electoral legislation to fraud. To this day, Trump spreads the conspiracy theory that he was only deprived of a second term through alleged electoral fraud.
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