Texas has an ugly, shameful history of voter suppression and racial oppression that we need to acknowledge. Throughout the years, Texas legislators have adopted a number of explicit measures to keep Black people from voting – from poll taxes to comprehension tests to white primaries to penal disenfranchisement provisions – under the guise of maintaining the “purity of the ballot box.”

• The term “purity of the ballot box” has been used throughout this country’s history as a justification for states to disenfranchise groups they deem to be unfit to vote or somehow lacking in virtue, including citizens who have been convicted of certain felonies or citizens who have only lived in a given state for a limited period of time. 
• As the Supreme Court itself noted in 1972, “[p]reservation of the ‘purity of the ballot box’ is a formidable-sounding state interest,” but it cannot be used to justify any and all voting requirements that a state might think up. Cite: Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330, 345 (1972).
• In Texas, this language derives from the Texas Constitution of 1876, which was the culminating document of a ten-year process aimed at continuing the disenfranchisement and dispossession of Black citizens following the Civil War. Of the ninety delegates who drafted the Constitution of 1876, only five were Black. And when it came time for the public to vote on the 1876 Constitution, Black voters across Texas opposed it. Cite: Seth Shepard McKay, Making the Texas Constitution of 1876 (1924); Lawrence Delbert Rice, The Negro in Texas 1874-1900 (1968). 
• Racist usage of this “purity of the ballot box” language continued long after the passage of the State Constitution in 1876. In 1904, Senator Joseph Bailey echoed this language in a speech in which he said, “I believe more in the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race than in the principles of democracy.” Cite: Bruce A Glasrud, Child or Beast?: White Texas’ View of Blacks, 1900-1910, 15 E. Tex. Historical J. 38 (1977). 
• In 1913, State Representative Joseph O. Boehmer of Eagle Pass formed the “Ballot Purification League,” and filed a bill admitting his intent was “to disqualify the Mexicans of the Western and Lower Rio Grande Counties.” Cite: Brief of National Latino Organizations as Amici Curiae In Support of Respondents, Shelby Cnty., Ala. v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) (No.  12-96), 2013 WL 476707.
• In 1937, a Texas court called on the “purity of the ballot box” language to justify the legislature’s enactment of poll taxes for voters between the ages of 21 and 60 as a “necessary qualification for voting,” despite the fact that poll taxes were a tool used to disenfranchise Black and Mexican-American voters. Cite: Texas Power & Light Co. v. Brownwood Pub. Serv. Co., 111 S.W.2d 1225, 1227 (Tex. Civ. App. 1937).
• In 1943, when Texas’ system of all-white primaries were challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, Texas Attorney General Gerald C. Mann filed an amicus brief defending all white primaries. He wrote: “The question involved in this litigation . . . is of such importance to the citizenship of Texas and to the preservation of the purity of the ballot box in primary elections, that as Attorney General of Texas, he feels that it is his duty to file this brief.” Cite: Brief of Gerald C. Mann, Attorney General of Texas as Amicus Curiae, Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) (No. 51), 1943 WL 54366.
• In the 1970s, Texas officials defended a burdensome voter registration statute on the theory that it would promote the purity of the ballot box and protect against voter fraud. Even then, a federal district court acknowledged that the theory of the “purity of the ballot box” justification for restrictive voting requirements was suspect. The court rejected the State’s argument for promoting the “purity of the ballot,” finding the “purity” justification amounted to a belief by the State that “those who overcome the annual hurdle of registering at a time remote to the fall elections will more likely be better informed and have greater capabilities of making an intelligent choice than those who do not care enough to register.” The court also rejected the State’s argument that the voter registration requirements would “insure against fraudulent votes,” writing that such requirements were “not necessary in any way to prevent fraud and [did] not encourage full participation by the citizens of Texas.” Cite: Beare v. Smith, 321 F. Supp. 1100, 1106-07 (S.D. Tex. 1971), aff’d sub nom. Beare v. Briscoe, 498 F.2d 244 (5th Cir. 1974).
• As the Ninth Circuit acknowledged in dicta in a 1972 case challenging penal disenfranchisement, the “[s]earch for modern reasons to sustain the old governmental disenfranchisement prerogative” often ends with “a quasi-metaphysical invocation that the interest is preservation of the ‘purity of the ballot box.’” Penal disenfranchisement, like many voting restrictions, disproportionately affects Black and Brown citizens’ ability to exercise their right to vote, including in Texas. Cite: Dillenburg v. Kramer, 469 F.2d 1222, 1224 (9th Cir. 1972).

There is no doubt where the “purity of the ballot box” phrase came from or what it was intended to do. 

As for SB7, – the “purity of the ballot box” phrase may have been removed, but the discriminatory voter suppression provisions of the bill that the phrase was intended to justify remain.

And that is why we keep fighting.

Because the party lines may have shifted over the past 150+ years, but it’s the same paternalistic and racist conspiracies being used to delegitimize votes cast by Black and Brown voters and anyone else deemed unworthy by those who will hold our democracy hostage to hold on to power.