Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) submitted testimony in opposition to two omnibus voter suppression bills introduced in the Texas special legislative session that began Thursday, July 8, 2021. Texas House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 1 would impose severe, needless, and discriminatory restrictions on voting by mail, curbside voting, and the receipt and provision of voting assistance. They target for elimination the common-sense methods of voting, such as “drive-thru” voting and 24-hour early voting, that proved invaluable for Black and Latino voters in Texas’s largest cities in 2020. And both bills would empower partisan poll watchers to disrupt election administration—while criminalizing other election officials for simply doing their jobs by encouraging and facilitating access to the franchise for eligible, registered Texans.
During Texas’ regular legislative session, which ended in May, thousands of Texans testified in opposition to H.B. 6 and S.B. 7, measures that would have severely restricted early voting — negatively impacting “Souls to the Polls” — emboldened partisan poll watchers, prohibited mail-in ballot drop boxes, subjected election administrators to a slew of new election-related criminal offenses, and required the purging of voters based on responses to a jury summons, among other anti-democratic provisions. LDF submitted testimony in March calling for Texas lawmakers to vote down S.B. 7.
Read the full written testimony in opposition to House Bill 3 here.
Read the full written testimony in opposition to Senate Bill 1 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.
