Fox News host Chris Wallace confronted Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) on Sunday over his support for restrictive new voting legislation in his state, suggesting that the bill was intended to “suppress” voters of color.
Wallace asked Abbott about his move to ban new voting procedures that were implemented in Harris County during the pandemic, that drove turnout.
“They would ban 24-hour voting and they would ban drive-through voting,” Wallace said. “There was no allegation of any fraud in either of those. Harris county, the Houston area, employed both of those and more than half of the voters who showed up were people of color.”
“So you say you want to make it easier to vote,” Wallace continued. “That’s going to make it harder to vote. And then the question is why make it harder for some Texans to vote unless the point is suppress voting by people of color?”
Abbott argued that Harris county was exceeding its legal limits in bringing in new voting rules and it was up to the state to regulate elections. He also accused Harris county officials of having tried “to create its own election system that had never been used in the state of Texas.”
“Why not let it go on?” Wallace asked. “If 24-hour voting worked, why not continue it?”
Abbott said that the same concerns about disenfranchising people were made when voter I.D. laws were introduced.
“When Texas passed a voter I.D. Law – everyone said the exact same thing, this is going to disenfranchise people of color, it will reduce voting,” Abbott said. “And the fact of the matter is after we passed voter I.D., we increasingly saw every election cycle, more people go and vote, they did not make it harder to go vote, it was easier to go vote. And the same thing applies here and with 24-hour voting, one thing that we want to make sure that we have is integrity in the ballot box system and we need to have poll watchers and monitors and is can be hard to get people watching the polls 24 hours a day,” Abbott added.
“If you do drive-through voting are you going to have people in the car with you and it could be somebody from your employer or somebody else who may have some coercive effect on the way you may cast a ballot – which is contrary to you going to the ballot box alone and no one there watching over your shoulder,” Abbott continued.
“The bottom line is Harris county, under the constitution, is not allowed to come up with their own rules,” he added.
