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Bills would give state officials unusual authority over one particular part of the state.
Local officials and activists who talked to POLITICO say the election bills are just one part of a larger movement to take direct aim at Houston. Dallas and Austin have been hit with conservative criticism for years, but Harris County has attracted particular interest from Republican state politicians.
The county was a target of the Legislature’s sweepingRepublican-dominated legislatures meddling in the affairs of blue urban centers is happening around the country, especially across the South: As these areas attract diverse, more left-leaning residents, Republican state legislatures often try to rein in what they see as runaway liberal actors. Fewer than two dozen of Texas’“We are going to set a precedent that this can happen to anyone’s county in this entire state at any given point,” Democratic state Rep. Christian Manuel said on the floor last week, pointing to the growing populations of other counties like Dallas. “The state wants to have the ability to seize local election administration, and so they wave Harris County’s name around like a bloody shirt to gin up support for these proposals,” said James Slattery, the senior supervising legislative attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, a liberal legal advocacy group. Republicans supporting the measures say they are only interfering because of issues that popped up with election administration in 2022 — including paper shortages and temporarily missing ballots. “We never wanted the state to get involved in what we considered local issues,” said Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel. “As it relates to election integrity, the only recourse that voters have, candidates have, the party has, is either legislation or litigation.” But Democrats say they won those races because they performed better, and Republicans in the state are simply retaliating. “They pulled every trick in the book, and for them to have made no gains, I think they’re just genuinely pissed,” Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu, who represents Houston, said in an interview. “They can’t win the seats, they’re going to go and try to find ways to punish the county.” “Harris County is not too big to fail, but too big to ignore,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican who has introduced a dozen elections bills, including some of those aimed at his home county. Its population alone would make it the 25th biggest state in the country: “That’s why this legislation has some urgency to it.” Republican legislatures see seizing back control of the area as a means of stymying larger trends in the state. Tarrant County, helmed by Fort Worth outside of Dallas, is run almost universally by the GOP. But Democrats have made inroads there in recent cycles. In 2022, statewide Democrats like gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourkein a county that favored Republicans by 16 points in 2014. O’Rourke also won the county during his 2018 Senate run, as did President Joe Biden in 2020. Wu, the state’s representative, points out that if Tarrant County flips blue, “every single major metro area will be [under] Democratic control, and that will be a sizable portion of the state.” State Rep. Chris Turner, who represents Tarrant County and formerly chaired the Democratic Caucus, said Republicans are concerned about how much ground they’ve lost, not just in Tarrant County but also in other growing counties like Hays, Williamson and Collin. “This is not just about one or two counties,” Turner said. “Republicans are losing support in the areas of state where most of the people live, in our urban and rapidly growing suburban areas. It doesn’t [bode] well for them.” Other state legislatures have passed or considered legislation directly reacting to conservative qualms or with tight population brackets in the past few years, including Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and Kansas. The Texas state Legislature also passed a measure removing the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps states maintain their voter rolls. AElsewhere, Republicans in the nonmember states Oklahoma and North Carolina have pushed legislation making it more difficult for their states to join ERIC in the future.
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