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      ‘Shameless’: Texas Republicans lead the charge on voting clampdown

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterTexas Republicans are at the vanguard of a national push to curtail voting rights, with lawmakers targeting the voters and policies that helped Democrats make inroads in the 2020 election.Texas legislators have introduced 49 bills restricting voting access, far more than any other state, even as major Texas-based corporations such as American Airlines express fervent opposition.The sweeping provisions could deal an outsized blow to low-income residents, people with disabilities, city dwellers and Texans of color, many of whom belong to diverse, youthful cohorts whose political views spell trouble for the GOP.And, in a twist that differentiates Texas from other states such as Georgia and Arizona that have instituted or are planning voting restrictions, some of the proposals impose extreme penalties on people who make even innocuous missteps.“When you make making a mistake on a voter registration application a second-degree felony, that’s the equivalent of arson and aggravated kidnapping,” said Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.Conservative politicians have tried to justify the rollback by hiding behind Donald Trump’s claim that last year’s presidential contest was stolen – despite a complete lack of evidence, and even though their party won handily in Texas.Allegations of widespread voter fraud have almost become a “litmus test” among Texas Republicans, said Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.Conservatives’ political futures could hinge on whether their base believes they are cracking down on the non-issue. And, as a new generation of voters comes of age, the specious talking point provides cover for politicians who can see that their party’s prospects may be dimming.Although Republicans maintained their ironclad grip on Texas last year, Trump’s margin of victory in the presidential race winnowed to less than six points, from a nine-point lead four years earlier. Democrats also gained significant ground during the 2018 midterm elections, when former representative Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid to incumbent Ted Cruz by fewer than 215,000 votes.The state’s current officeholders know they will not be able to get re-elected on the issues alone, so they are moving the goalpost, said Claudia Yoli Ferla, executive director of civic engagement non-profit Move Texas.“These legislators are seeing the writing on the wall, and they’re scared of the power of young people. They’re scared to have the true voices of our communities reflected,” Yoli Ferla said.Already Texas subjects its residents to a byzantine electoral system, giving it a reputation as thehardest place to vote in the US. Voters do not have access to same-day registration, and they can only register online if they are simultaneously updating their driver’s license.Then, at the ballot box, hardline documentation requirements honor handgun licenses as a form of accepted identification, but not student IDs. Mail-in voting is so limited that last fall, voters were forced to gather in long lines, in-person, regardless of the coronavirus pandemic.But despite Texas’s legacy of voter suppression, large, Democratic counties – most notably Houston’s Harris county – came up with innovative approaches to expand access to the polls last year. For instance, Harris county implemented 24-hour and drive-thru polling sites, while the local election administrator tried to send mail-in ballot applications to every registered voter.Instead of lauding those solutions, Republicans fought them hard. Now, the state’s leaders are working to ensure they are not an option for future elections.“Whether it’s the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots, or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” said the Texas governor, Greg Abbott.In February, while Trump’s national defeat was still fresh, Abbott designated so-called “election integrity” as one of five emergency items for the legislature. As of late last month, Texas was leading the charge among 47 total states that had introduced 361 bills restricting the vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.One Texas bill would do away with drive-through polling places, allow partisan poll watchers to electronically record voters, and set limits on early voting hours.Another could consolidate voter registration responsibilities under the secretary of state, sidelining local governments.Yet another would dangle felony charges over basic activities, such as public servants proactively distributing applications to vote by mail.Texas is already known for criminalizing the ballot box, especially among communities of color. Under the state’s current attorney general, Ken Paxton, at least 72% of prosecutions by the so-called election integrity unit have targeted Black and Latino residents, according to the ACLU of Texas.Those severe penalties cause confusion and can have chilling effects on would-be voters. In the border community of Brownsville, people fear they can’t legally vote for reasons that should not be disqualifying, such as their family’s immigration status, said Ofelia Alonso, a regional field manager for youth organizers at Texas Rising Action.“It’s already such a hostile environment for folks that want to participate in the process, but these restrictions would make it even harder,” Alonso said.In an ironic turn, the proposed reforms may inadvertently affect senior citizens, who are among the few demographics eligible to vote by mail, and whose bloc trends right.As the Texas legislative session ramps up, voting rights advocates and experts are especially concerned by two omnibus bills filled with restrictions, SB7 and HB6. Both are already advancing through the legislature.“It’s kind of difficult to be able to have a strategy on, like, how to target this,” said Alonso, “when we know that the majority of the Republicans in the Texas legislature are very shameless.”Unlike in Georgia, where backlash from corporations such as Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines came retroactively, the Texas bills have already become a lightning rod.“Free, fair, equitable access to voting is the foundation of American democracy,” Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies, tweeted in early April. “Those rights – especially for women, communities of color – have been hard-earned.“Governments should ensure citizens have their voices heard. HB6 does the opposite, and we are opposed to it.”American Airlines similarly came out against SB7, saying the company is “strongly opposed to this bill and others like it”.But, emboldened by victory in 2020, the state’s conservatives don’t seem to care. When corporate giants decried the bills for being anti-democratic, Abbott simply warned them to “stay out of politics”.“Their priority’s to stay in power, with whatever means necessary,” Alonso said. “And election fraud is a good fearmongering way to rile up their base and not have to come out and say what they’re doing are Jim Crow tactics.“They won’t say it, but we know what it is.” More

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      Matthew McConaughey, Texas Governor? Voters Seem to Like the Idea.

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      A new poll may put some wind in the actor Matthew McConaughey’s sails as he considers whether to run for governor of Texas.Forty-five percent of the state’s voters said that they would vote for Mr. McConaughey if he were to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott next year, according to the poll, conducted by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas, Tyler.An additional 33 percent of voters said they would support the incumbent, while 22 percent said that at this early stage, they would prefer to choose someone else.But such highly theoretical questions can sometimes produce wonky results, especially this far in advance of any actual campaigning. That’s doubly true when the hypothetical involves a figure with name recognition as high as Mr. McConaughey’s, particularly in his home state.The actor has repeatedly flirted with running for governor, though he has not said whether he would run as a Republican or a Democrat. Last month he said he was seriously considering a bid.“I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” he said on a podcast. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”His fortunes in the new poll were particularly good among independents, 44 percent of whom said they’d support him and only 18 percent of whom said they would back the governor, a Republican.Yet Mr. Abbott’s job approval rating was healthy, with 50 percent of voters giving him positive marks and 36 percent negative. Fifty-four percent said he had responded well to the state’s power failure crisis, driven by strong support from Republicans; independents tilted away from him here, with 50 percent saying he had handled it badly and 43 percent saying he responded well, the poll found.The survey was conducted from April 6-13 among 1,126 registered Texas voters, using a mixed-mode approach that included live phone interviews as well as online polling through the Dynata database. More

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      Texas bill to carry gun without permit advances to state senate

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      This week, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill dubbed “Constitutional Carry” that would allow citizens over the age of 21 to carry a gun without a license, drawing outrage from many state Democrats and gun-reform advocates.Texas law currently requires citizens to obtain a license to carry in order to carry a firearm openly or concealed. If passed into law, the new bill would remove that restriction, allowing Texans to carry guns without having to pass a background check or go through training. Texas would become the 14th state to implement such a law.The bill arrives on the heels of several recent mass shootings that have taken place around the country. On Thursday night, a gunman killed eight people including four members of the Sikh community in an Indianapolis FedEx warehouse. Earlier this month in Bryan, Texas, a man opened fire at a cabinet company where he was previously employed. One man died and five others were injured, including a state trooper.On Twitter, former congressman Beto O’Rourke expressed his support for those protesting the bill at the state capitol in Austin. He echoed their demands for common sense gun laws.“Grateful to @joecascinotx and those doing their best to stop HB 1927 and ensure that we have common sense gun laws in Texas,” O’Rourke tweeted. “Thank you for showing up and stepping up for Texas!”After a mass shooting in his native El Paso in August 2019 that left 23 people dead and another mass shooting that same month where 7 people were killed at a Cinergy movie theater complex in Odessa, O’Rourke had given an impassioned speech on gun reform and his proposal for a mandatory assault weapon buyback program.“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore,” he said then.Protesting the bill at the state capitol, Becca DeFelice, a volunteer for Moms Demand Action Texas chapter, said: “It’s not complicated, and it’s not controversial: gun owners like me know that responsible gun ownership means going through a background check and safety training before carrying loaded handguns in public.”State Democratic representatives Rafael Anchía and Diego Bernal offered an amendment to the bill that would prevent “insurrectionists … or violent white supremacist extremist[s]” from possessing firearms, but it failed to make it in the bill because it did not gain enough votes.In addition to 84 state Republicans, seven democrats voted in favor of the Constitutional Carry bill. Representative Morgan Meyer of Dallas was the only Republican to vote against the bill. The bill will now advance to a Republican-majority Senate, where the fate of the bill will be determined. More

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      The Marriage Between Republicans and Big Business Is on the Rocks

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      But the internal contradictions of “woke capitalism” are a mixed blessing for the Democratic Party.“Woke capitalism” has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the past decade. The muscle of the movement was evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.Much to the dismay of the right — a recent Fox News headline read “Corporations fear woke left minority more than silent majority” — the movement has been gaining momentum, obscuring classic partisan allegiances in corporate America.This drive has a fast-growing list of backers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, prepared to challenge Republican legislators across the nation.Right now, the focus of chief executives who are attempting to burnish their progressive credentials is on blocking legislation in 24 states that curtails access to the ballot box for racial and ethnic minorities — legislation that, among other things, reduces the number of days for advance voting, that requires photo ID to accompany absentee ballots and that limits or eliminates ballot drop boxes.Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them.The corporate embrace of these strategies has generally received favorable press, but there are some doubters.Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in “‘Woke Capital’ Doesn’t Exist” on April 6 that capital “pursues its financial interests in whatever political or social context it finds itself.”As Serwer puts it,For big firms, talk is very cheap. Similarly, the actions of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, and Delta reflect the political landscape in Georgia and its interaction with their bottom line, not the result of a deep ideological commitment to racial equality.Similarly, Matthew Walther argued in an August 2017 article in The Week, thatWe should not be looking to corporate America for moral instruction or making exemplars of its leaders or heaping approbation upon their bland, cynical consultant-designed utterances.Apple’s Tim Cook, Walther continued, “tells us that he is against racism. I believe it. Good on him.” As commendable as Cook may be for his antiracism, Walther writes, heis the C.E.O. of a corporation that has made profits on a scale hitherto unimaginable in human history by exploiting cheap labor in a poor country ruled by tyrants whose authority is perpetuated in no small part thanks to Apple’s own compliance in its silencing of dissent and hiring the smartest lawyers in the world to make their tax burden negligible.Companies leading the charge against laws promoted by Republican state legislators include Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, Merck & Co., Dell Technologies, Mars Inc., Nestlé USA, Unilever PLC and American Airlines.And just two days ago, 30 chief executives of Michigan’s largest companies, including Ford, General Motors and Quicken Loans, declared their opposition to similar changes in voting rules pending before the legislature.The headline on an April 10 Wall Street Journal story sums up the situation: “With Georgia Voting Law, the Business of Business Becomes Politics.” The law was described by USA Today on April 10 as one “that includes restrictions some activists say haven’t been seen since the Jim Crow era.”Last week, executives from over 100 companies held a video conference call to explore ways to voice their opposition to pending and enacted election legislation.For many Republicans, the future of their party’s dominance in such states as Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia rides on their ability to hold back the rising tide of minority voters.While Republicans are convinced of the effectiveness their legislative strategies, poll data from the 2020 election suggests they may be mistaken. Republicans made inroads last year among Black and Hispanic voters, the constituencies they would now suppress, while losing ground among white voters, their traditional base of support.Growing numbers of Republicans are refusing to buckle under pressure from the corporate establishment.For Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who rejected Donald Trump’s pleas to overturn the state’s presidential election results, the controversy offers the opportunity to claim populist credentials and perhaps to win back the support of Trump loyalists.“I will not be backing down from this fight,” Kemp declared at an April 3 news conference:This is a call to everyone, not only in Georgia but all across the country to wake up and get in the fight and help us in that fight. Because they are coming for you next.In Texas, where American Airlines, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Southwest Airlines have opposed laws under consideration by Republican state legislators, Republicans have been quick to go on the attack.“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, declared in a news release attacking liberalized voting protocols. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Other Republicans are explicitly warning business that it will pay a price if it goes too far. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, declared at an April 5 news conference. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.”In the past, the corporate community has been one of McConnell’s most steadfast allies and its current adversarial stance is a major loss.Alma Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, and three colleagues, analyzed campaign contributions made by 3,800 individuals who served as chief executive of large companies from 2000 to 2017 in their 2019 paper, “The Politics of C.E.O.s.” They found a decisive Republican tilt: “More than 57 percent of C.E.O.s are Republicans, 19 percent are Democrats and the rest are neutral.”I asked W. Bradford Wilcox, a conservative professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, for his assessment of the conflict between big business and Republicans. His reply suggested that Kemp’s defiant stance will resonate among Republican voters:The decades-long marriage between the G.O.P. and big business is clearly on the rocks. This is especially true because the G.O.P. is increasingly drawn to a pugnacious and populist cultural style that has more appeal to the working class, and Big Business is increasingly inclined to support the progressive cultural agenda popular among the highly educated.Taking on corporate America meshes with the goal of rebranding the Republican Party — from the party of Wall Street to the party of the working class.The response of the white working-class to the leftward shift on social issues by American businesses remains unpredictable.Democracy Corps, a liberal group, conducted focus groups of white Republicans in March and reached the conclusion that conservative voters are cross-pressured:The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.While anger is a powerful motivator of political engagement, despondency and the feeling of powerlessness often depress turnout and foster the belief that political participation is futile.Opinion on the motives of corporate leaders diverges widely among those who study the political evolution of American business.Scholars and strategists differ among themselves over how much the growth of activism is driven by market forces, by public opinion, by conviction and by the growing strength of Black and Hispanic Americans as consumers, employees and increasingly as corporate executives.James Davison Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, is interested in the psychology of those in the executive suite:At least on the surface, corporate America has accommodated progressive interests on these issues and others, including the larger agenda of Critical Race Theory, the Me-too movement, the gay and transgender rights, etc. There has been a shift leftward.The question he poses is why. His answer is complex:The idea, once held, that what was good for business was good for America is now a distant memory. A reputation, long in the making, for avoiding taxes and opposing unions all in pursuit of profit has done much to undermine the credibility of business as a force for the common good. Embracing the progressive agenda is a way to position itself as a “good” corporate citizen. Corporations gain legitimacy.The fluid ideological commitments of business should be seen in the larger context of American politics and culture, Hunter argues:Over the long haul, conservatives have fought the culture war politically. For them, it was the White House, the Senate and, above all, the Supreme Court that mattered. Political power was pre-eminent.Progressives have struggled in political combat, while in the nation’s cultural disputes, in Hunter’s view, the left has dominated:Even while progressives were losing elections, gay and transgender rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter and critical race perspectives were all gaining credibility — in important cultural institutions including journalism, academia, entertainment, advertising, public education, philanthropy, and elsewhere. Sooner or later, it was bound to influence corporate life, the military, and other so-called conservative institutions not least because there was no credible conservative alternative to these questions; only a defensive rejection.How will this play out?We will continue to see ugly political battles long into the future, but the culture wars are tilting definitively toward a progressive win and not least because they have a new patron in important corporations.Malia Lazu, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued in an email that the public’s slow but steady shift to the left on racial and social issues is driving corporate decision-making: “Corporations understand consumers want to see their commitment to environmental and social issues.”Lazu cited studies by Cone, a business consulting firm, “showing that 86 percent of Americans would support a brand aligned with their values and 75 percent would refuse to buy a product they saw as contrary to their beliefs.”Lazu contends that “there is a generational shift in America toward increasing justice and collective responsibility” and that as a result, “institutions, including corporations, will make incremental change.”John A. Haigh, co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, does not agree with those who see business motivated solely by potential profits, arguing instead that idealism has become a major force.“Corporations have an obligation to deliver high performance for their shareholders and other stakeholders — customers, employees, and suppliers,” Haigh wrote in an email. But, he continued, “corporations also have an obligation to do so with high integrity.”In the case of challenges to restrictive voting laws, Haigh believes thatthere is also a possibility that they are behaving with some sense of their moral obligation to society — with integrity. The right to vote could be seen as a pillar of our democratic system, and blatant attempts to suppress votes are offensive to our core values.Haigh says that he does not wantto sound Pollyannish — these are difficult trade-offs within corporations, and it is much more complicated than simply “doing good.” But there are thresholds for moral behavior, and companies do have an obligation to speak up. There is a long history in the U.S. around issues of civil rights and their suppression, and mixed engagement by companies in addressing these issues.Neal Hartman, a senior lecturer who is also at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued that in attacking voting rights, Republicans violated a tenet of American democracy important to voters of all stripes.Not only have the restrictive proposals in Georgia and other states awakened “strong levels of activism among many moderate-to-liberal voters,” Hartman wrote by email, butmany people in the United States — including a number of more conservative individuals — believe voting should be as simple and widespread as possible. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy.Corporations, Hartman continued,are responding to calls from the public, their shareholders, and their employees to respond to bills and laws deemed as being unfair.Hartman argues that “voting rights is front and center today,” butnot far behind will be efforts to thwart LGBTQI rights — bills targeting the transgender community are already being introduced and passed — as well as continuing battles regarding abortion and the rights of women to choose.There is some overlap between the thinking of Robert Livingston, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Haigh and Hartman:What we are seeing in Georgia is an affront to people’s basic sense of morality and decency. And people will sometimes subordinate their self-interest to cherished values and beliefs. Many of these companies have credos and core values that are internalized by their leadership and employees, and we see leaders becoming increasingly willing to express their disapproval of the reckless temerity of politically savvy but socially irresponsible politicians.Livingston acknowledges that many companies aremotivated by their own interests as well. Major League Baseball is an organization that depends on people of color. Nike tends to cater to an increasingly youthful and diverse customer base. So, there is something in it for them too.But, he continued, “I’ve worked with a lot of top leaders and can tell you that for many of them, it’s more a question of principle than politics.”Joseph Aldy, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, noted in an email that willingness to engage in controversial political issues is most evident in the case of climate change:The climate denial/climate skeptic attitude that characterizes many Republican elected officials is increasingly out of step with the majority of the American public and the American business community.Instead, Alby wrote,the continued focus on cultural issues among Republicans reflects a growing estrangement between the business community and the Republican Party.There are several possible scenarios of how these preoccupations and conflicts will evolve.Insofar as the split between American business and the Republican Party widens and companies begin to cut campaign contributions, the likely loser is Mitch McConnell, the leader of the party’s corporate wing. Any limit on McConnell’s ability to channel business money to campaigns would be a setback.Such a development would further empower the more extreme members of the Republican Party’s Trump wing and would embolden Republican officials to escalate their conflict with corporate America.For example, David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House — which has just passed a retaliatory bill penalizing Delta by eliminating a tax break on jet fuel — told reporters: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”Finally, for Democrats, the leftward shift of business is a mixed blessing.On the plus side, Democrats gain an ally in pressing a liberal agenda on social and racial issues.On the downside, the perception of the party as allied with corporate interests may take root and Democratic officials are very likely to face pressure to make concessions to their new allies on fundamental economic policies — bad for the party, in my view, and bad for the country.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Daca immigrant fighting to empower young Texas voters

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      Claudia Yoli Ferla can’t vote herself.But, by registering and educating others, the 28-year-old immigrant and El Pasoan has helped thousands of fellow Texans gain access to the polls, despite the blot of voter suppression in her state.Now – as Republican lawmakers push reforms that would subject constituents to even more barriers at the ballot box – Yoli Ferla is seeking to fight back by empowering a powerful bloc of young voters who could transform Texas’s political future.“I cannot wait til the day that I get to cast a ballot,” she told the Guardian. “But I know that that moment will only come with the continued organizing of young people on the ground, demanding systematic change not only from Congress, but also our state leaders.”As the incoming executive director at Move Texas, a non-partisan, youth-focused civic engagement non-profit, Yoli Ferla wants to use her platform to uplift the voices, stories and lived experiences of other young people, trying to turn first-time voters into lifetime organizers.Young Texans are far from a monolith ideologically: 72% of Latino voters ages 18-29 supported Joe Biden in 2020, while 51% of their white counterparts swung for Donald Trump.But overall, a strong majority of the state’s youth backed the Democratic presidential nominee last year, signaling a changing of the guard that could help liberals turn Texas blue – if only enough young voters are able to exercise their right.“Our generation has historically, and will continue to be, disenfranchised by our very own democracy,” Yoli Ferla said.Originally from Venezuela, Yoli Ferla immigrated with her mom to El Paso as a child. She grew up undocumented, then eventually won protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields her from deportation but does not provide a pathway to citizenship or representation.Meanwhile, in the predominantly Latino border city where she was raised, she learned how marginalized communities, including her own family, have been disproportionately hurt by Texas’s hard-line voter restrictions.From strict ID requirements to no same-day registration and extremely limited vote-by-mail or online registration, Texas is known as one of the hardest places to cast a ballot nationwide. It’s no wonder that the state has chronically low voter turnout, compared with much of the country.“Texas, you know, is now a leader in that anti-democratic, anti-voting fight,” Yoli Ferla said.In recent days, Texas electoral politics have left much of the nation aghast after state lawmakers advanced highly contentious bills, directly targeting many of the innovations that successfully expanded voting access amid the coronavirus pandemic.The legislation would do away with drive-in voting locations, allow partisan poll watchers to record voters, and limit mail-in voting, among other provisions.“We want a system that people can trust, we want it to be accurate, and we want folks to know that it’s accurate,” said Texas state senator Bryan Hughes, leaning into a specious myth about voter fraud fueling Trump’s defeat.“If folks don’t trust the system, they’re not going to vote.”The sweeping restrictions are taking up a lot of air, even as roughly 48,000 Texans have died from Covid-19 and residents continue to build back after a devastating winter storm that left millions without power or water mere months ago.Legislators should be focused on “bigger problems”, Yoli Ferla said, “like addressing the ongoing pandemic, addressing the climate crisis, ensuring that we’re working towards immigration reform and uprooting our criminal justice system”.“But instead,” she said, “they choose to engage in a fight centered on unicorns and fairy tales”.As conservatives’ ironclad grasp on Texas shows some signs of weakness, Yoli Ferla believes politicians who are anti-democratic see the writing on the wall: they’re not going to be able to win on the issues anymore, so they’re shifting the goalpost.“It couldn’t be more clear that the number one priority in their playbook is to suppress our power,” she said.Yoli Ferla envisions a Texas where officials and policies reflect the increasingly diverse constituencies they represent – an ambition that relies on a more engaged electorate.That means she’s got a lot of work to do. But she already knows how to build strong relationships, a secret weapon of hers in the fight to drum up civic engagement.She remembers working on a student voter initiative, where she met a young man who had just turned 18. The program helped him register to vote, but it also got him excited about his local democracy, and he went on years later to work as the field director for a first-time candidate in El Paso.She knows “that his story is not an isolated one”.“When we get young people to have this conversation, to engage in this conversation,” Yoli Ferla said, “when we give ’em an opportunity to really share their story, when we give ’em an opportunity to understand how these issues intersect with their very basic civic duty, which is to vote – I think the lines start to connect.” More

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      Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw ‘virtually blind’ after eye surgery

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      The Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Saturday that he had undergone eye surgery and would be “effectively blind” for a month.Crenshaw, 37, is a veteran of the elite navy Seals force. He lost his right eye and sustained damage to his left eye in Afghanistan in 2012, when a bomb exploded.“The blast from 2012 caused a cataract, excessive tissue damage, and extensive damage to my retina,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “It was always a possibility that the effects of the damage to my retina would resurface, and it appears that is exactly what has happened.”Crenshaw said the retina to his left eye was found to be detaching after he went to an ophthalmologist because of dark, blurry vision, and that he underwent surgery on Friday.“The surgery went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” according to Crenshaw.Crenshaw, a staunch conservative who has stoked controversy on the national stage, was re-elected in November representing Texas’ 2nd district, in the Houston area. More

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      Crystal Mason Was Sentenced to Five Years Behind Bars Because She Voted

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      The G.O.P.’s war on voting has human casualties. Here’s one.Whenever you hear Republican rants about widespread voter fraud supposedly undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of their elections, remember the story of Crystal Mason.Ms. Mason, a 46-year-old grandmother from the Fort Worth area, has been in the news on and off since 2016, when Texas prosecutors decided she was a vote fraudster so dangerous that justice demanded she be sentenced to five years behind bars.Her offense? Visiting her local precinct on Election Day that year and casting a provisional ballot for president. Ms. Mason was not eligible to vote at the time because she was on supervised release after serving a prison term for federal tax fraud. Texas, like many states, bars those with criminal records from voting until they have finished all terms of a sentence.Ms. Mason, who had only recently returned home to her three children and had gone to the polls that day at the urging of her mother, said she did not realize she wasn’t allowed to cast a ballot. When poll workers couldn’t find her name on the rolls, they assumed it was a clerical error and suggested she fill out the provisional ballot.Provisional ballots are a useful way to deal with questions about a voter’s eligibility that can’t be resolved at the polling place. Since 2002, Congress has required that states offer them as part of the Help America Vote Act, a law passed in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle, when millions of ballots were disqualified. Ms. Mason’s ballot was rejected as soon as a search of the database determined that she was ineligible. In other words, the system worked as it was intended to.Tarrant County prosecutors went after her for illegal voting anyway. They said she should have known she was not allowed to vote. The state had sent her a letter telling her so in 2012, shortly after she had been sentenced in the tax-fraud case. The letter was delivered to her home, even though she had already begun serving her sentence. “They sent it to the one place they knew she was not going to be,” said Alison Grinter, Ms. Mason’s lawyer.The prosecutors also pointed out that when she cast her ballot in 2016, she signed an affidavit stating that she had completed all terms of her sentence. Ms. Mason said she had not read the fine print; she was focused on writing down her address in exactly the form it appeared on her driver’s license. She was convicted after a one-day trial and sentenced to five years behind bars for casting a ballot that was never counted.“It’s a surreal experience to be in a courtroom for these trials,” said Christopher Uggen, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Minnesota who has studied the impact of felon disenfranchisement for decades, and has testified as an expert in prosecutions of people charged with illegal voting. “You’ve got the judges, you’ve got the lawyers. You’ve got somebody who often is a model probationer called in, and what’s at issue is whether they voted. I have this overriding sense of, gosh, don’t we have other crimes to prosecute? It really should be a consensus issue in a democracy that we don’t incarcerate people for voting.”Mr. Uggen said that there is a stronger case for criminal punishment of certain election-law offenses, like campaign-finance violations or sabotaging voting machines, that can do more widespread damage to our election system. But in his own work he has found that the people who get punished are more likely to fit Ms. Mason’s description: female, low-level offenders who are doing relatively well in the community. “These are not typically folks who represent some great threat to public safety,” he said.You wouldn’t get that sense from how Ms. Mason has been treated. After her voting conviction, a federal judge found she had violated the terms of her supervised release, and sentenced her to 10 extra months behind bars. That punishment, which she began serving in December 2018, earned her no credit toward her five-year state sentence.Ms. Mason has continued to fight her case, but so far she has lost at every step. In March 2020, a three-judge panel on a state appellate court rejected her challenge to her sentence. The court reasoned that she broke the law simply by trying to vote while knowing she was on supervised release. It didn’t matter whether she knew that Texas prohibits voting by people in that circumstance.This appears to be a clear misapplication of Texas election law, which criminalizes voting only by people who actually know they are not eligible, not those who, like Ms. Mason, mistakenly believe that they are. It’s as though Ms. Mason had asked a police officer what the local speed limit was, and he responded: “Beats me. Why don’t you start driving and see if we pull you over?”Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, agreed to rule on Ms. Mason’s appeal. It’s her last chance to avoid prison for voting. Tossing her conviction would bring a small measure of justice to a woman whose punishment should have been limited to, at most, not being able to cast a ballot.But it wouldn’t give her back the last four years of fear and uncertainty she has endured for no good reason. Ms. Mason’s first grandchild was born a few months ago, another reminder of how much she would miss if she were to lose the appeal and end up back behind bars. “This is very overwhelming, waking up every day knowing that prison is on the line, trying to maintain a smile on your face in front of your kids and you don’t know the outcome,” Ms. Mason told The Times in an interview. “Your future is in someone else’s hands because of a simple error.”Identifying errors like these is the whole point of offering provisional ballots: The crazy quilt of voting rules and regulations that Americans face from state to state can trip up even the best-informed voters, and honest mistakes are common. By prosecuting Ms. Mason, just one of more than 44,000 Texans whose provisional ballot in 2016 was found to be ineligible, the state is saying that you attempt to participate in democracy at your own risk.That risk is almost always higher for people of color. Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, likes to brag about the 155 people his office has successfully prosecuted for election fraud in the last 16 years — an average of fewer than 10 per year. What he doesn’t say out loud is what The Houston Chronicle found in an analysis of the cases he has prosecuted: almost three-quarters involved Black or Latino defendants, and nearly half involved women of color, like Ms. Mason.At this point you might be wondering why Ms. Mason was ineligible to vote in the first place. She had been released from prison, after all, and was trying to work her way back into society. As more states are coming to understand, there is no good argument for denying the vote to people with a criminal record, and that’s before you consider the practice’s explicitly racist roots. There is even a strong case to be made for letting those in prison vote, as Maine, Vermont and most Western European countries do. And yet today, more than five million Americans, including Ms. Mason, are unable to vote because of a criminal conviction. That has a far greater impact on state and national elections than any voter fraud that has ever been uncovered.Given the disproportionate number of Black and brown people caught up in the criminal justice system, it’s not hard to see a connection between cases like Ms. Mason’s and the broader Republican war on voting, which so often targets people who look like her. The nation’s tolerance of prosecutions for the act of casting a ballot reveals a complacency about the right to vote, Mr. Uggen said, and a troubling degree of comfort with voting restrictions generally. “There’s a slippery slope: If you start exempting individuals from the franchise, it’s easy to exempt other individuals by defining them outside the citizenry,” he said. “What is shocking to me is that people view this as acceptable in a political system that calls itself a democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterAs Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states.Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail.Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures.After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said those statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Gutierrez has been involved in fights over voting rights for more than a decade and said he could not recall another instance where there was the kind of broad opposition to the bills that exists now.“A lot of us are thinking that Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is all these prominent voices weighing in are coming in much earlier,” he said.Attention on Texas, one of the lowest-ranking states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers advanced a measure that appears squarely aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand voting access. In addition to blocking drive-thru and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in Harris county, home to Houston, in 2020, the law also prevents officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In addition the bill imposes new requirements on people who assist voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in allocating election equipment.The measures would clearly empower partisan poll watchers. One measure allows poll watchers to record voters at the polls if they “reasonably believe” they are receiving illegal assistance. Another provision makes it harder for local officials in charge of an election precinct to remove poll watchers during voting.“It is a huge deal because of how many incidents we see in Texas of poll watchers misbehaving and needing to be disrupted for a good reason,” Gutierrez said.Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen“This is an invasion of privacy, it’s an invasion of ballot secrecy, it could be potentially very intimidating,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials across the country. “Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen.”In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing a slew of anti-voting measures. One priority is a bill that would make changes to a list voters can join to automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to enable the state to remove voters from the list if they don’t vote by mail in at least two consecutive elections. About 200,000 voters who didn’t vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.“This is a really important piece of our election system. It’s been in place just like it is for more than a decade. People trust it, they love using it,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, which is lobbying against many of the proposed changes. “This year, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw going into and after the election, Republicans in the state legislature are attacking it.”Advocates are also concerned about another bill that would require voters to provide either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when they return a mail-in ballot (Arizona currently uses signature comparison to verify the identity of mail-in voters). Those requirements would pose difficulties for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, a Native vote fellow at Indian law clinic at Arizona State University.Dolan said that it can be difficult to find out a voter registration number online and noted that the bill currently did not allow for the use of tribal identification cards as a form of identification. Many Indigenous elders, she noted, were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates, and therefore have approximate birthdays.“Arizona election law, before this cycle, was not equally accessible to Native Americans,” she said. “As more barriers go up, it only exacerbates that gap from access.”Aside from legislation, Arizona Republicans are also moving ahead with more efforts to stoke uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The state senate, controlled by Republicans, is moving ahead with a recount and audit of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous, months after the state certified the election. The county has already completed an audit of its voting equipment, which found ballots were counted correctly.One of the four firms the senate hired to lead the audit is led by Doug Logan, who has publicly said he believes there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 and advanced other conspiracy theories about the election, according to the Arizona Mirror.“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin in 2016 in a state senate, had decided they wanted to, six months after an election, start an audit of the ballots of an election that was already certified and the people were already in office?” Becker said.“And then they hired the consultant, someone from out of state who had publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? That’s a mirror image of what’s happening in Arizona right now.” More