Ad campaign targets GOP election bills as Texas Legislature begins work

As the Texas Legislature begins work on Republican bills to tighten or restrict election practices, a liberal advocacy group will launch an ad campaign that paints the effort as an attack on voting rights.

MOVE Texas leaders said the organization will spend more than $100,000 on ads running in six areas of Texas, including Austin, to target two priority bills for GOP officials — House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7 — as bad policy designed to silence minorities and young voters.

Both bills have committee hearings scheduled this week — Monday in the Senate and Thursday in the House — starting a process that will lead to floor votes in each chamber.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who designated election integrity as an issue that requires emergency action by the Legislature, threw his weight behind the bills during a Houston news conference last week, calling them essential to reducing the potential for voter fraud.

"Any voter fraud that takes place sows seeds of distrust in the elections process," Abbott said. "We (must) remove that distrust by doing all we can to ensure that every eligible voter can cast a vote but no one will be able to cast an illegal vote."

Opponents of the bills argue that Republicans are using relatively rare cases of fraud to justify legislation designed to restrict voting rights.

"Senate Bill 7 and House Bill 6 represent the most egregious assault on voting rights here in Texas since the Jim Crow era," said H. Drew Galloway, executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund.

Instead of helping, the bills would do "significant damage" to the democratic process, Galloway said.

"In a state that already has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country, the true aim of these bills is abundantly clear — to target young, Black and brown voters and silence the voices of a rising Texas electorate," he said.

The organization's ads will appear online, in newspapers, on social media and on radio in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Amarillo, Lubbock and the Rio Grande Valley.

Sections of the bills to which MOVE Texas objects include provisions to:

• Ban county officials from sending unsolicited applications for mail-in voting to registered voters — something Harris County's Democratic clerk tried to do last year before GOP officials sued, blocking the effort.

• Make it a felony to use public money to help a third party send vote-by-mail applications that were not requested by a voter.

• Give the attorney general broad authority to investigate and prosecute participants in get-out-the-vote campaigns.

• Require all those seeking to vote by mail because of a disability to prove, with documents that can include a doctor's affidavit or Social Security statement, that they have a condition that prevents them from voting in person.

• Require every polling place in a county to have "approximately the same number of voting machines" regardless of population density.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, is the author of more than a half-dozen bills that he said are designed to require uniformity in the way elections are handled across the state — including allowing polls to open only from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., blocking cities from running 24-hour polling places, and ensuring that rural and city voters have equal opportunities to vote.

"I don't think there's any denial of voting rights with that," Bettencourt said during Abbott's news conference, which also included state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, who wrote HB 6.

Cain insisted that the Republican efforts are not designed to make it harder to vote.

"The only form of voter suppression is when an ineligible voter casts a ballot. When an ineligible voter casts a ballot, what they're actually doing is silencing the voice of an American citizen, of someone that is eligible to vote," Cain said.

Opponents of the bills are equally insistent that the legislation is part of a wider Republican effort designed to limit voting opportunities for those most likely to support Democrats. Votes cast by mail in November, for example, were much likelier to support Democratic candidates.

Polls also show most Republican voters believe election improprieties are widespread, fueled by former President Donald Trump's continued but unsupported claims that his November defeat was the result of fraud.

MOVE Texas' weeklong ad campaign, which will begin Monday, urges Texans to "oppose Gov. Abbott’s radical anti-voter bills, HB 6 and SB 7."

"As Texas struggles to recover from a disastrous storm response by our state leaders, Gov. Abbott and the state Legislature are trying to take away your right to vote," the ad says. 

Monday's hearing on SB 7 will begin at 9 a.m. before the Senate State Affairs Committee, where the bill's author, Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, is chairman. Several other GOP bills also are on the agenda, including stronger efforts to verify the citizenship of registered voters and penalize county officials who fail to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

The House Elections Committee plans to hold a hearing on HB 7 beginning at 8 a.m. Thursday. The bill's author, Cain, is chairman of that committee.