Following is the testimony of Common Cause Texas Associate Director Stephanie Gomez as delivered to the House Elections Committee in opposition to House Bill 6
Common Cause is a national, nonpartisan advocacy organization that works on a broad range of voting rights and democracy issues.
Every election in Texas is a hurdle for voters. Texas has the most restrictive voting laws in the nation, and even the COVID-19 pandemic would not sway state leadership into adopting measures that would make it easier and safer for Texans to cast a ballot. In fact, opponents of an equitable and accountable democracy have decided to utilize this legislative session to impose even greater restrictions on the people of Texas, instead of directing attention and resources to the issues affecting Texans, such as recovery from the winter storm and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
House Bill 6 is a fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-voter bill, drafted to serve partisan interests-– not Texas voters. House Bill 6 is rooted in Texas’s shameful history of voter suppression, and sacrifices the democratic participation of Texans, disproportionately Black, Latinx, and Asian-Pacific Islander Texans, in our elections in order to stay in power.
We must act to make our democratic system more inclusive, resilient and equitable. House Bill 6 must be stopped in order to protect Texas democracy, and to put an end to partisan actors weaponizing misinformation and distrust in our elections to silence the will of the people.
Among the most concerning trends of House Bill 6 are:
Weaponizing partisan poll watchers
Poll watchers are essential and valued players in our elections – however, they are not free from bias nor fault . We see inappropriate actions from poll watchers all the time during elections. And it should be noted – it is not a problem limited to one political party. Poll watchers being overzealous is a bipartisan problem, but it’s a problem that the current statute handles fine. Empowering the poll watchers to have more power than the election clerks would have potentially disastrous consequences. House Bill 6 would protect the actions of partisan poll watchers over trained election officials, making it easy for Texas to see many of the same voter intimidation issues at the hands of partisan poll watchers that came up in previous elections.
Section 3.01 threatens presiding judges with a Class A Misdemeanor criminal offense if they remove partisan poll watchers from polling places, or require them to leave polling places. Section 3.04 creates a new Class B misdemeanor offense for election officers who intentionally or knowingly refuse a watcher. Poll workers were rightfully held in high regard for supporting Texas through our elections during the 2020 pandemic — it is disheartening to see their roles demonized and in need of extensive supervision in order to push forward partisan interests.
Granting poll watchers who serve partisan aims and interests disproportionate power over our elections will only weaponize our elections and undermine the bipartisan cooperation between election judges and workers who run our elections to ensure they are safe and secure.
In fact, weaponizing poll watchers in this way creates the opportunity where our polling locations become literal battle zones. Partisan actors and aims are championed over process and principle, creating divisions between election judges and workers that have served our elections for years. Partisan actors will be incentivized to disrupt poll sites, creating a messy cycle of disrupting voting as a part of a campaign — and the voters and our democracy will suffer
Partisan poll watchers activities often target Black and Brown neighborhoods – there are examples throughout our history. Dating back to at least 2010, there are documented reports of poll watchers in Harris County and other parts of the states intimidating voters, primarily Black and Brown voters, and election workers at the polls.
House Bill 6 simultaneously extends the rights of poll watchers in Section 3.05 and 3.09. There is plenty of historic evidence of partisan poll watchers, however, being weaponized in Black and Brown communities in Texas to stand outside of polling locations to scare voters – and we can expect that this will be an even greater issue in Black and Brown communities in Texas, disproportionately affected voters in need of assistance, etc. And most recently – in 2020, we saw partisan poll watchers fuel misinformation and distrust in our elections, elections, filing affidavits across the country that did not hold up in court and helping to lay the foundation for the deadly white supremacist attack on our nation’s Capitol.
The following images are examples of some of the threats and intimidation efforts faced by our Election Protection volunteers during the 2020 election.
With the appropriate checks on their power, poll watchers acting in good faith serve an important role in our elections. However, any legislation that would grant unchecked power to partisan poll watchers cannot ignore the recent and long history of poll watching being weaponized as a tool for intimidation, misinformation and partisan gain.
Burdening voters in need of assistance
Section 4.01 would require people who assist voters, who are not election officers, to complete a form that provides their name, address, an explanation of their assistance to the voter, justification, and relationship to the voters. This requirement would extend into mail-in-ballots, requiring the same information disclosed on the carrier envelope. Section 4.02 adds “I did not pressure or intimidate the voter into choosing me to provide assistance” into the oath sworn by voter assistants. Section 5.05 would create a perjury criminal offense for false assistant oaths, although there are already provisions in this code to address these issues without deterring people from assisting voters in need. People who need assistance in voting are among some of our most vulnerable populations- these are first time voters, senior voters, voters with disabilities, voters in need of language assistance, etc. These forms are at best unnecessary paperwork and language that extend the time it takes for voters to cast a ballot, and at worst, attempts to codify voter intimidation.
In Sections 4 and 5 we see a number of changes to existing law that would make procedures increasingly complex and confusing while increasing the penalties for violating those laws, even if done unintentionally.
Section 5.04 expands what qualifies as a criminal offense of election fraud and increases the criminal penalties for all forms of election fraud to a second degree felony. Section 5.05 creates a new criminal offense for public officials who alter or suspend election processes, creating a state jail felony and serving as another threat to public officials exercising their judgment. This is particularly concerning because we see it happen all the time that a county election administrator and the Secretary of State will have differing ideas on how a piece of Election Code should be interpreted or implemented. The idea that the state will now be able to unilaterally decide when the county is wrong, and penalize them in various ways, is downright authoritarian.
Particularly in light of recently released data from the ACLU of Texas, clearly showing the racist manner in which this Attorney General has sought to pursue “voter fraud” charges, we strongly urge the members of this committee to reject this discriminatory legislation, and focus on the real problem we have with Texas elections — not enough people participating.