Texas GOP advances flood of bills to make voting harder

Texas Republicans have recently amped up their efforts to undermine the democratic process by advancing a barrage of legislation aimed at locking in their control over state government. These bills would make voting more difficult, withdraw the state from a national organization that helps ensure the accuracy of voter rolls, and even enable GOP officials to replace locally chosen election administrators and potentially invalidate election results in a Democratic stronghold.

One bill advanced in the Senate enables the Republican Secretary of State Jane Nelson to take away control over how elections are run from county officials, who are elected or appointed locally. The bill relies on a vaguely worded standard of whether the secretary "has good cause to believe" that voting and election administration problems exist—not hard proof that they do, let alone whether they actually prevented people from voting. One of the reasons listed includes merely the delayed reporting of election results.