Dem Rep. Allred: TX Voting Bill ‘Is So Explicitly Discriminatory That It Is Embarrassing’

Representative Colin Allred (D-TX) said Monday on MSNBC that the Texas Senate Bill 7, a Republican-backed bill on election rules, is “so explicitly discriminatory that it’s embarrassing.”

Texas Democrats stopped the passage of the bill Sunday in a walkout that blocked the necessary quorum required to pass the law.

Governor Greg Abbott (R) vowed to pass the measure into law in the next legislative session.

Allred said, “I think our democracy is at a tipping point. What you just talked about here is overturning elections, stopping certain Americans from voting. That’s how you lose your democracy. We’re having a very sanitized conversation about this, pretending, so to speak, that this is Democrats and Republicans and the usual push and pull. This is not usual. This is not normal. Talking about being able to overturn elections because you want to have fraud allegations or stop specific groups from voting is totally outside the balance.”

He continued, “I’m really grateful and proud of Texas House Democrats for using whatever tools they have at their disposal to try to stop this bill from passing last night. That was the right thing to do, and obviously, the governor said he’s going to call a special session, and they’re going to come back and try to pass this bill.”

Allred added, “When you’re talking about moving back Sunday early morning voting, which that’s been a tradition in Texas for years, and every single day of early voting, you can vote in the morning but all of a sudden on Sunday, you can’t go vote until 1:00 in the afternoon, or you can vote between 1:00 and 9:00 in the afternoon. That is so clearly aimed at souls to the polls and stopping Black voters from going to church, one of the few institutions the Black community has had for so long, going to church and talking and going together to the polling place, which is a tradition in the black community. That is explicitly targeting Black voters. But they’re also targeting other types of assistance for voters in which English isn’t their first language in polling places to harass them. This bill is so explicitly discriminatory that it’s embarrassing. I was a voting rights lawyer when I came to Congress. We often see these things as a little bit nebulous. It’s hard to say. This is not one of those bills. This is extremely explicit. ”

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