From the Texas Tribune: Voters, voting rights groups sue Gov. Greg Abbott over order to close ballot drop-off locations

 As to be expected.

- Click here for the article. 

Voting rights advocates and civic groups have filed two separate federal lawsuits to block Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's last-minute order that allows Texas counties to provide no more than one drop-off location for voters casting absentee ballots.

Late Friday, the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, the get-out-the-vote group BigTent Creative and a 65-year-old voter asked a federal judge in Austin to overturn the governor’s Oct. 1 order, which forced Travis and Harris counties — two of the state’s most important Democratic strongholds — to shutter a number of drop-off sites they had already opened this week. The challenge came a day after The Texas and National Leagues of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters of Texas and two Texas voters filed a lawsuit calling the directive an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote that will disproportionately impact voters of color in the state’s biggest cities.

“The impact of this eleventh-hour decisions is momentous, targets Texas’ most vulnerable voters—older voters, and voters with disabilities—and results in wild variations in access to absentee voting drop-off locations depending on the county a voter resides in,” attorneys in the LULAC suit argued. “It also results in predictable disproportionate impacts on minority communities that already hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis.”