SB-1993 IS BAD

Turns out that the state legislature in Texas is poised to pass new legislation that would, I mean, it looks like target the most democratic and largest county in the state, because they don't like the way people there vote. Okay. So what are they doing? Well, they want to concentrate more power for the Secretary

of State to overturn the results of the elections if there's a paper ballot issue, which doesn't sound too crazy, right? But paper ballots seem important, but let me get to the details here. And more importantly, which counties would be impacted by this and which counties wouldn't be impacted by this. So the Republican state lawmakers in the Lone Star State

are advancing a bill this week that would allow the Secretary of State, who is handpicked by the governor, and we all know who the governor of Texas is, Greg Abbott, to overturn the results of an election. According to Newsweek's reporting on this, uh, according to the text of the bill, SB 1993, the Secretary of State, a position appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott and currently held by Jane Nelson would have the authority to throw

out election results in counties wherein 2% or more of the polling locations ran out of ballot paper for more than an hour. So that more than an hour part of it is fascinating because that didn't happen during the midterm elections and the election officials managed to get the paper for the ballots within a few hours, one particular county in Texas that's been voting Democratic since 2008

would have the election results thrown out. Okay. They could do a like a re-election, like they could vote again, but think about what that means. That means that people need to spend time and resources to go back to the voting place and cast another ballot. Wait, I'm not sure that Abbott and the Republicans have

yet realized that maybe less people would vote the second time because he's already had the election. Maybe they hadn't considered that. Oh, we should call them. Like I think people should write letters, because that's a consequence they haven't considered. This proposal, by the way, really reminds me of what Texas did in the very beginning of rolling back reproductive

rights in the state. So they passed laws indicating that an abortion clinic would need to shut down if their hallways weren't a certain width. And it's nonsense. It means nothing, right? It has no impact on the safety of the procedure. It has, you know, no life-threatening consequences whatsoever.

They just wanted to make it incredibly difficult to have an abortion clinic in the state. Well, and also both of these instances of like the government looking for like specific facts they can exploit to shut something down that they don't like, down to the level of measuring like the space between the top of the door and the ceiling is exactly the sort of like bureaucratic nonsense that conservatives have always said that they

hate, but in this case, they like the outcome, so they're fine with it. No, a hundred percent. And so like let's get to the county that this would impact, because that's the other thing. They're so obvious about what they're doing here. So um it targets Harris County in particular. While the text of the legislation does not explicitly mention

Harris County, the authority it would vest in the Secretary of State applies only to counties with populations higher than 2.7 million. Harris is the largest county in Texas with nearly 4.7 million residents. And the only one to meet this requirement, with the second largest, Dallas County, boasting only 2.6 million residents. Ah, didn't quite get there.

So this is like when for decades there was extra strict scrutiny on election laws that certain southern states were coming up with. This is a great demonstration of why that was necessary. And not just because this is uh obviously specifically targeted at Democrats or that it's transparent in the way that it's trying to apply to certain counties and not others, but it's also in this case very intentionally targeting a

county that has a lot of people of color living in it. So it's the exact same thing that the voting rights act was intended to stop. And that's why it was such an amazing thing for the Republicans when they decided that that was gonna be gone, they weren't gonna be doing that anymore. Now, Republicans in the state are arguing that listen, this

is just a response to something disastrous that happened during the midterm elections. And we just want to write that wrong. Okay, we're just we want to protect democracy. That's how they're trying to sell it to people, right? So it's uh response to uh what happened in Harris County in 2022, where some Republicans tried to use election day problems in the county to justify overturning the results

of the midterm elections there. So in Harris County during the 2022 midterm elections, 26 out of the county's 782 polling locations. So a narrow majority. Exactly, uh, were affected, according to the Houston Chronicle. Despite the relatively small number of locations affected, the issue was seized upon by Texas Republicans, some of whom claimed that the shortages cost them their races, ultimately leading to

the push for legislation that resulted in SB 1993. Harris County has also, as I mentioned earlier, tipped Democratic in every presidential election since 2008. They are tar think about how much they are actively spitting in your mouth with this argument. They are actively targeting this county, you know it, because it's Democratic. And the Republicans are pretending that there is something unique

about these 26 counties that meant that they were disproportionately conservative, and that's why their vote briefly being uh hampered resulted in them losing their their election, even though it's what is it, a couple percentage points of the total number of polling places? This this is as insulting a political argument as I can come up with. It's embarrassing.

I'm gonna try to come up with more, but for now, this is more. Like, have some dignity, right? Like how embarrassing is it that like you lose in this county, and rather than maybe doing a little self-reflection, why is it the fine people of Harris County, for some reason are not favoring the Republican candidates? I mean, you could, you know, do that self- reflection, make

some changes, propose things that are appealing to the voters, to the constituents there. But you could also cheat. It's difficult. And it seems like they're going in the cheating direction. Yeah, yeah. Now, I have heard in the wake of this coming out, some really simple minded supposed solutions.

Some people are saying that rather than giving this huge amount of new power to the Secretary of State and canceling elections and holding another one, why not just have more paper available? I don't know exactly why. I'm assuming that there are rare earth elements that are needed for that paper, and as we all know, China has really gobbled up a lot of the min.es in

Africa where that stuff is produced No, but but but really think about how stupid this is so they can't just make more paper available which would solve the problem of paper not being available. So instead they're going to throw away all of the results of the election and hold another election where they're gonna need paper not only for those 26 locations but for the other 250.

So it would be like 20 times more efficient just in terms of paper, let alone everything else to just bring in some boxes of paper. A few more reams and we can avoid so much trouble. Yeah. Just make sure you got those reams folks bring the reams in.

Right? You're looking ream too much. I think the issue is that in some of these parties they're gonna be readings they'll get reamed by the Republican Party in the state of Texas. So let's just call it what it is. Thanks for watching the Young Truths really appreciate it. Another way to show support is through YouTube memberships.

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