Texas GOP To Consider Electoral Law Changes That Would Effectively Shut Democratic Candidates Out of Statewide Races

The Texas Republican Party is considering supporting a change to the state constitution that would effectively prevent Democrats from getting elected to statewide offices indefinitely and likely reduce the influence of minority voters in statewide elections.In the Texas GOP’s 2024 platform, the party is considering adopting a plank that would institute a sort of state level electoral college, which would add an additional requirement to winning statewide office.The proposed state constitutional amendment would require a candidate to win a majority of the vote in a majority of Texas’s 254 counties.Under this framework, the vote cast in Loving County, which had a population of 43 people according to the 2020 census, would be worth just as much as the vote cast by Harris County, which has a population of about 4.8 million.With most of Texas’s population concentrated in just a few metro areas and counties, the change would radically reshape elections in the state, effectively locking Democrats out of statewide elected office.The 2018 Texas Senate election illustrates the potential impact of the change in procedure. In 2018, Senator Cruz won re-election over the Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, with 50.9 percent of the vote to Mr. O’Rourke’s 48.3 percent of the vote.However, Mr. O’Rourke only won the majority vote in 32 Texas counties, with Mr. Cruz winning the majority of the vote in the other 222 counties.Although the 2024 Texas Senate race is not expected to be as competitive as the 2018 Senate race, the change would be all but guaranteed to prevent the Democratic nominee, Colin Allred, from winning the election.Texas would not be the first state to enact such a system at the state level, if the GOP manages to force the proposal through the state legislature.Up until the law was changed in 2020, a candidate for governor in Mississippi was required to win both the statewide popular vote and a majority of the popular vote in the majority of the state’s 122 state House districts. If no candidate met both those criteria, the state House would choose the governor.Georgia also had a similar system in place between 1917 and 1962 for statewide primary elections. In Georgia’s system, each county was allocated a number of “unit votes” based on its status as a city, town, or rural area.In order to win the statewide primary in Georgia, a candidate had to win the majority of “unit votes.” The system, however, was ruled unconstitutional in 1962, when the Supreme Court found that it violated the rule of “one person, one vote.”The Texas proposal would likely face similar legal challenges if implemented because a county-based election scheme would reduce the voting power of minority groups in the state.In Texas, white non-hispanic residents constitute a majority in 165 of Texas counties, even though there are roughly as many non-Hispanic white Texas as Hispanic Texans overall. Black Texans also do not constitute a majority of any county in the state and thus would likely not be represented in the county electoral scheme, if it were implemented.As it stands, it’s unclear if the Texas GOP will adopt support for the electoral changes as part of its party platform, and the party is planning to finalize its 2024 platform on Wednesday.

Texas GOP To Consider Electoral Law Changes That Would Effectively Shut Democratic Candidates Out of Statewide Races

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