Democrats walk out on Senate Bill 7

Let's start off with the publicity stunt that the Texas Democrats engaged in over the weekend.

Texas Democrats staged a mass walkout and prevented a vote on Senate Bill 7. Monday was the last day to get it through and what did the Democrats do? They all just walked out because they think the bill is absolutely outrageous that Texas would want to secure its elections. Of course, what's being pushed is the idea that the election laws specifically target people of minority descent, and stop them from being able to vote.

Well, if that's the claim, what is Senate Bill 7, the Texas Voter Integrity law which so dramatically changes the way elections are handled? Let's go through it.

Here are some points that Democrats have a serious issue with.

Requiring paper trails for voting. Senate Bill 7 would move all Texas counties towards voting machines that offer a paper trail by producing an auditable paper record of ballots cast. We fail to see where that's racist Jim Crow voter suppression.

Setting new rules for voting by mail. It's quite long, so here’s the TLDR. Voting by mail requires voter ID and counties are not allowed to send out absentee ballots without them being requested, which is a law that's pretty much across the nation.

Mail-in ballots/absentee ballots can only be requested. You have to request one, then it gets sent to you instead of printing out millions of them unsolicited and just mailing them out without any tracking or any accountability whatsoever. Again, how is this racist?

Setting up new rules for removing people from the voter rolls. The legislation would set up a new mechanism for the Texas Secretary of State's office to remove people from voter rolls based on questions about their citizenship status, AKA purging the voter rolls of people who might not be alive anymore or people who are not citizens of the United States.

Once again, how is this racist?

Requiring the recording of vote counting. Though vote tallying is a crucial step in the democratic process, it's frankly a boring part of it. Under SB-7 live streams of the counting could be viewed by all with a live feed and recording of the actual vote count itself, which once again fails to prove how this affects anybody negatively based on the pigmentation of their skin.

What Texas Democrats view as their strongest point is limiting how local officials can expand voting options. In drafting S-B 7, Senate Republicans made clear some of its proposed restrictions are meant as a response to voting initiatives implemented by Harris County for the 2020 election. But the proposed new restrictions would apply across the state regulating voting hours.

Currently, counties with a population of 100,000 or more must provide at least 12 hours of early voting each weekday of the last week of early voting. The early voting period usually runs two weeks ahead of Election Day hours for that last week of early voting and are usually set from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM.

SB-7 would lower that population threshold to 30,000, so more counties would be required to offer more early voting between the new established window of 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM, but the legislation would also set a 12-hour cap on how long early voting can run during that week. So if polling places stay open till 9:00 PM, they would have to open up later in the morning, so at 9:00 AM, enabling more early voting but just creating a very strict timeline.

A 12-hour period every day for two weeks is not voter restriction, it’s just a basic regulation, a timeline of when you can vote, and only early vote, and if 12 hours a day for two weeks is not enough for voters to get their vote in, then we don't know what to tell you.

Once again, not voter restriction based on the pigmentation of anyone’s skin, and it seems as though it applies to every single county in the state at large rather than targeting minority communities as the Democrats may claim. But of course, that won't deter the president from pushing them to abide – Joe Biden on Memorial Day, “democracy itself is in peril with restrictive voting laws.”

We don't get how democracy is in peril by creating common-sense laws around voting. How is it even a political position? How is it not political suicide or political sabotage by pushing forth this idea that elections should be less secure, to push this idea that you shouldn't even have to prove that you're a citizen, or you shouldn't have to show ID before voting?

It’s absolute nonsense, and once again, Democrats are pointing the finger at everyone else, but the finger should flip around and point right at themselves.