A few nights ago, Politico interviewed Beto O’Rourke, who’s been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the proposed law to reform Texas voting procedures.
“If the president and the Senate fail, then at some point, we face the inevitable, which is that Texas will pass further voting restrictions,” O’Rourke told the publication. “I don’t know that you’ll still have a democracy in Texas.”
Texas Senate Bill 1, which passed earlier this week, would require voters to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their applications for a mail-in ballot. For the mail-in ballot to be accepted and verified, voters would have to include matching information on the envelope used to return their ballot. The legislation would also bar local election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications.
The legislation would give watchers “free movement” around polling places, while also making it a criminal offense to obstruct the view of the poll watcher or keep poll watchers too far from where election work is being done.
Last year, Harris County – which includes the city of Houston – enacted two new changes that the state legislation would ban, drive-through voting in 10 locations and 24-hour voting in eight locations. O’Rourke specifically laments the reform bill would “end measures that have increased access to the ballot box like 24-hour voting and drive-through voting.”
First, no jurisdiction in America has ever previously had in-person voting for 24 hours. If not having 24-hour-voting amounts to a state no longer being a democracy, no state other than Texas has ever been a democracy.
Secondly, drive-through voting was devised as a “safer, socially-distant alternative to walk-in voting for all voters.” It was a pandemic measure meant to minimize person-to-person contact that could spread COVID-19. It had nothing to do with maximizing turnout. The notion that you must get out of your car to cast your ballot is not something new, different, or menacing.
The Senate bill would set early voting hours from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.; similar legislation in the House bill would set those hours from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
These changes, O’Rourke contends, could spell the end of democracy in Texas.
Our Charlie Cooke noticed last month that O’Rourke has not, as Joe Biden suggested on the campaign trail, been selected for some role in the Biden administration to help with gun control efforts. While Kamala Harris is the vice president, Pete Buttigieg is running the Department of Transportation, John Hickenlooper moved on to the U.S. Senate, Tim Ryan is running for the Senate, and even Bernie Sanders now has considerable influence with the administration, Beto O’Rourke is the largely forgotten man. He’s raising money for Texas Democrats and helping finance their escape to Washington, D.C., and the rest of the party is waiting to see if O’Rourke wants to run for governor.
But for a guy who was called the next Barack Obama for much of 2018 and 2019, O’Rourke has largely fallen off the radar screen, like a one-hit wonder whose second album bombed. (When his presidential campaign ended, I wrote, ‘he is the political equivalent of Reebok’s Dan and Dave competition, the Macarena, The Blair Witch Project, and any other short-lived trend that seems inexplicable in retrospect.”)
From his wildly hyperbolic comments – it’s not enough for O’Rourke to say he opposes the proposed legislation, he has to contend it represents the end of “democracy in Texas” — you might conclude that O’Rourke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And that’s fine, lots of politicians are prone to wild exaggerations and not-all-that-accurate comparisons.
But it might have been nice if the national media that celebrated O’Rourke with a uninhibited wholehearted frenzy for a year or two had picked up on those flaws.