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Texas Republicans have muscled through legislation allowing unprecedented state interventions into elections in Harris County, the most populous county in Texas, threatening to drastically overhaul elections in the Democratic stronghold.
The bills targeting Harris, which would eliminate its chief elections official and allow state officials to intervene and supervise the county’s elections in response to administrative complaints, are headed to the governor’s desk.
Lawmakers say they’re responding to repeated election issues in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston. The county, for its part, has signaled it will challenge the bid to remove its elections administrator and is portraying the bills as a partisan power grab and the latest in a series of legislative moves by Texas Republicans to tighten access to the ballot in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Some election and policy experts say the moves set a bad precedent, mirror strategies recently used by GOP-led legislatures in Florida and Georgia to gain control of local elections, and could signal state lawmakers’ intention to seek control in counties beyond Harris. The continual changes to elections administration in Texas, which intensified in 2021 with the sweeping voting bill Senate Bill 1, could also foster public distrust, said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA.
“Election administration should really be something that’s stable and something that people can rely on,” Griffith said.
Instead, the bills represent the latest battle in the partisan war over how elections should be run in Texas, and who should oversee them.
Senate Bill 1933, authored by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican, grants the Texas secretary of state the authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed — but only in counties with more than 4 million people, which means just Harris County.
