The League of United Latin American Citizens, as well as several individual voters, sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his Thursday order that allowed local election officials to set up just one mail ballot drop-off location per county.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday evening, alleges that the new policy — which was announced the day before several drop-off locations were scheduled to open — is a violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.
“The impact of this eleventh-hour decisions is momentous, targets Texas’ most vulnerable voters—older voters, and voters with disabilities—and results in wild variations in access to absentee voting drop-off locations depending on the county a voter resides in,” the lawsuit said. “It also results in predictable disproportionate impacts on minority communities that already hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis.”
County election officials from Harris County, Travis County, Fort Bend County and El Paso County are also named as defendants in the suit, as is Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs.
The lawsuit notes that counties like Travis and Harris — which have populations larger than some U.S. states and also sprawling geographies — had planned to offer several locations for absentee voters to drop off their ballots.
Before Thursday’s proclamation, the county election officials “were given no notice that they would be required to change their election operations in under 24 hours,” the lawsuit said.
Texas has been extremely resistant to making voting easier in the pandemic — it is one of a very few number of states not letting fear of COVID alone count as an excuse to vote absentee — but Abbott did issue orders earlier this year extending the period for in-person early voting as well as the period voters would have to submit their mail ballots in person.
The latest proclamation undermines that initiative, and came after Abbott faced a backlash from members of his own party who sued him in court over the moderate voter access measures had taken in light of the pandemic.
The new lawsuit alleges that “Abbott has provided no meaningful justification for the one-per-county limit on drop-off locations” and that the proclamation’s invocation of security was “unexplained.”
“Defendants’ insistence that every county in Texas provide only a single absentee ballot drop box—regardless of geographical size or population—requires that counties provide voters with disparate access to the franchise. Texas’s 254 counties vary dramatically in both physical size and population,” the lawsuit said.”The use of county lines as the delineation for the number of voting resources that may be provided is therefore arbitrary.”
The counties that stand to take brunt of the negative impact of Abbott’s order are those that have disproportionately high minority populations. The lawsuit alleges that the limits violate the Voting Rights Act because “because they deny and abridge the right to vote on account of race and language minority status.”
Read the lawsuit below:
You think we won’t kick your ass because you’re in a wheelchair?
Guess again, son!
Harris County, Texas here - we find it interesting that his bs rationale is safety from COVID, while what he’s doing will force people to wait in line to drop off their ballots at the ONE box in the county, thus exposing them to COVID. This along with the straight-ticket voting debacle? The call blitzkrieg has begun.
I think it was in WaPo, but there is a line in their reporting about how Kenosha county has 17 drop boxes for a population of just under 170,000, vs Harris county TX with a population of over 4 million.
This is about REPUBLICANS, not just but including Donald Trump, trying to steal the 2020 election.
That is what the real danger in 2020 is not Trump stealing the election or otherwise causing violence to prevent the peaceful transition of power but rather REPUBLICANS stealing the election or otherwise preventing the peaceful transition of power.
That is, like Bush in 2000, to steal the election Trump would need at least the Supreme Court to do what it did in 2000 and not care about the constitution or their oaths of office but just want a Republican to win.
But even that was not enough for Bush in 2000. Bush got lots of help from his brother, then governor of Florida, by stopping from voting over 50,000 minorities because they shared the same last name as a felon or other person “legally” prevented from voting.
But as it is likely Trump will need to steal multiple states as opposed to Bush who only needed to steal Florida, Trump will also need help from state courts and state legislatures and governors. This help would be to invalidate ballots and mess with the mail. It could also be to ignore the will of the voters and appoint electors that chose the loser.
Because the 2000 election was close it was possible to let Bush steal it and still claim we have a democracy. The difference this time is the vote is likely to be so much in Biden’s favor, for Republicans to steal the election would require the recognition by the world, if not the American media, that America does not have a functioning democracy.
That is the real question is not so much about Trump, but rather how far are Republicans, to include Supreme Court justices and all federal judges, Mitch McConnell and all Republican senators, but also state and local Republicans to include legislators, judges, and local administrators, ready to go to end American democracy.
Incoming 5th Circuit decision completely contradictory to the ruling they just issued saying it was too close to the election to make changes…