80th Legislature: Disasterous Voter ID Bill Passes House

House Bill 218, the catastrophic “Voter ID” bill passed the House on second reading yesterday 76-68-3.

Aside from surpassing the “Hamburger Bill” to become the major legislative accomplishment of the lackluster and partisan career of State Rep. Betty Brown (R-Terrell), the bill will make it very difficult for millions of Texans to vote and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of low-income, minority, and elderly Texans.

Before discussing the implications of this vote further, I want to direct you to an excellent exchange between the author and House Democratic Leader Jim Dunnam (D-Waco):

DUNNAM: So if I show up without a voter ID card, my voter registration card, but with five government photo IDs, I will get a provisional ballot, correct?
B. BROWN: You would have a provisional ballot, because you need to bring your voter registration card with you.
DUNNAM: And my vote won’t count.
B. BROWN: It will be a provisional ballot.

So, yeah. Your vote likely won’t count. This was something about the bill even I didn’t realize, and I’ve studied it extensively. I actually thought that, even under the bill, if you didn’t have your voter registration card and had multiple other forms of ID, your vote would count (ie, no provisional ballot). Not so however. Guess it’s another thing the Republicans managed to sneak in in the middle of the night.

Now, let’s get to the vote. Note the bold highlights below:

HB 218, as amended, was passed to engrossment by (Record 618): 76 Yeas, 68 Nays, 3 Present, not voting.

Yeas: Anderson; Aycock; Berman; Bohac; Bonnen; Branch; Brown, B.; Brown, F.; Callegari; Chisum; Christian; Cook, B.; Corte; Crabb; Creighton; Crownover; Darby; Davis, J.; Delisi; Driver; Eissler; Elkins; Flynn; Gattis; Geren; Haggerty; Hamilton; Hancock; Hardcastle; Harless; Harper-Brown; Hartnett; Hilderbran; Hill; Howard, C.; Hughes; Isett; Jackson; Keffer; King, P.; King, S.; Kolkhorst; Krusee; Kuempel; Latham; Laubenberg; Macias; Madden; McCall; Miller; Morrison; Mowery; Murphy; O D’ay; Orr; Otto; Parker; Patrick; Paxton; Phillips; Pitts; Riddle; Smith, T.; Smith, W.; Smithee; Solomons; Straus; Swinford; Talton; Taylor; Truitt; Van Arsdale; West; Woolley; Zedler; Zerwas.
Nays: Allen; Alonzo; Anchia; Bailey; Bolton; Burnam; Castro; Chavez; Cohen; Coleman; Cook, R.; Davis, Y.; Deshotel; Dukes; Dunnam; Dutton; Eiland; Escobar; Farabee; Farias; Farrar; Frost; Gallego; Garcia; Giddings; Gonzales; Gonzalez Toureilles; Guillen; Heflin; Hernandez; Herrero; Hochberg; Hodge; Homer; Hopson; Howard, D.; Jones; King, T.; Leibowitz; Lucio; Mallory Caraway; Martinez; Martinez Fischer; McClendon; McReynolds; Menendez; Merritt; Miles; Naishtat; Noriega; Oliveira; Olivo; Ortiz; Pickett; Pierson; Puente; Quintanilla; Raymond; Ritter; Rodriguez; Rose; Strama; Thompson; Turner; Vaught; Veasey; Villarreal; Vo.
Present, not voting—Mr. Speaker(C); England; Goolsby.
Absent, Excused—Flores; Moreno; Pena.

It should be noted that England and Goolsby, both “no” votes, paired their votes with the absent Flores and Pena, both “yes” votes.

First off, with the exception of absences, this is probably the first vote all session where the House Democratic Caucus was this united. Second, one Republican, Tommy Merritt (R-Longview) had the courage to vote against this bad legislation along with House Democrats.

In the “yes” votes, the bold names have some significance. Geren, Hamilton, and Krusee, Republicans all, were all supposed to be “cross-over” votes. Word around the Capitol Monday morning was that Geren was firmly a “cross-over,” and had even rebuffed personal threats from Texas Republican Party Chairwoman Tina Benkiser that she would see to it that $100,000 was poured into the coffers of a primary challenger.

Krusee and Hamilton ditched the cause after the first contested vote, on an amendment to the first amendment to the bill (Amendment 2). Geren stayed with the cause fairly consistently until the final amendments, when he ditched.

The reality about HB 218 is that it is a voter suppression bill. I’ve talked about it time and time again, so I’m not going to rehash what I’ve already said. I’m going to let an op-ed from the Star-Telegram do it for me:

“An insidious scheme to turn back the clock on voting rights in Texas tragically has once again made it’s way to the state house floor. The architects of this idea pitched as a noble effort to prevent voter fraud cannot be allowed to succeed with what is surely one of the greatest assaults on the right to vote in this state since the passage of The Federal Voting
Rights Act in 1965.”

A sad, sad, sad day for Texas.

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