Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (“LDF”) sent letters to the Texas Senate and House of Representatives expressing opposition to the Conference Committee Report on S.B. 1. The bill severely restricts access to voting and undermines Texans’ right to vote. S.B. 1 imposes severe, needless, and discriminatory restrictions on voting by mail and the receipt and provision of voting assistance. S.B. 1 targets and seeks to eliminate a number of accessible, common sense voting methods, including “drive-thru” voting and 24-hour early voting- both methods that proved invaluable for Black and Latino voters in Texas’s largest cities in 2020. The bill would also embolden partisan poll watchers to play an outsize role election administration— while criminalizing other election officials for simply doing their jobs to encourage and facilitate voting access for eligible, registered Texans. These restrictions may also violate federal law, including the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. We urge you to vote down the Conference Committee Report on S.B. 1 in its entirety.
Read the letter to the Texas House of Representatives here.
Read the letter to the Texas Senate here.
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Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation’s first civil and human rights law organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF. Follow LDF on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
