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Security bill format for Government

well good morning i want to start out by expressing my gratitude for uh senator bettencourt uh and representative kane for uh they're joining with us here today to talk about an issue that is so important to our fellow texans and that is election integrity but also so important to making sure that we protect the fabric of our democracy in the state of texas so thank you not just for being here but thank you for your leadership in the session you know there's really one thing that all of us can and should agree upon and that is we must have trust and confidence in our elections and that's not just me saying that that is the united states supreme court that says that in opinions that is issued on voter fraud based cases the supreme court the united states supreme court has been emphatic that we must have trust and confidence in elections and one way to do that is to make sure that we've reduced the potential for voter fraud in our elections but the fact is election fraud does occur i know that in part because of my time as attorney general in texas when i did make arrests and engage in prosecutions of people across the state for election fraud the current attorney general similarly has made arrests and prosecutions for voter fraud but this isn't something that's partisan in nature because even president barack obama engaged in prosecuting voter fraud in the state of texas when barack obama was president he used his u.s attorney for the southern district in texas as well as the fbi to prosecute a voter fraud scheme in south texas where cocaine was being used to pay voter harvesters and so it doesn't matter what party you're in it doesn't matter your party affiliation what matters is our collective effort to agree and then to achieve the goal of ensuring that we promote integrity in the election process and that achieves our goal of instilling trust and confidence in elections so the bottom line is this election fraud is unacceptable and that's exactly why i made it an emergency out in this session but know this because the fact is most people don't know what i'm about to tell you and that is election fraud is far more than just a legislative concept or a goal to be achieved in the state of texas is a constitutional obligation texas constitution article 6 section 4 says this in all elections by the people the legislature shall make such regulations as may be necessary to detect and to punish fraud and preserve the purity of the ballot box that is the mandate to these legislators and that's exactly what they are seeking to achieve our objective is very simple and that is to ensure that every eligible voter gets to vote is also to ensure that only eligible votes are the ones that count at the ballot box the integrity of elections in 2020 were questioned right here in harris county with the mail-in ballot application process the county elections clerk attempted to send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to millions of voters many of whom would not be eligible to vote by mail election officials should be working to stop potential mail-ballot fraud not facilitate it and that's exactly why the texas supreme court was right to put a stop to what harris county was trying to do also in harris county election officials created drive through voting which is not authorized by law texas law does allow curbside voting as an option only for certain voters such as voters unable to enter a polling place without personal assistance but election officials in harris county set up drive-through polling places for any voter including those who do not qualify for curbside voting whether it's the unauthorized expansion of mainland ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-through voting we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process we also must ensure transparency in the polls which is why texas does allow poll watchers from each party to participate in the voting and the tallying process poll watchers are critical to election integrity but this last election we saw poll watchers being denied the ability to do their job this session we must pass laws to make sure that poll watchers in texas are not going to be obstructed from observing the ballot counting process so once again i do want to express my gratitude but probably speaking for all texans the gratitude of everybody in the state of texas to senator betancourt as well as representative mccain for their efforts to step up and to provide robust legislation that they are working with the legislature as we speak to get through the capital and to get to my desk so i can sign it so with that i will open it up to senator bettencourt to tell more about what he's working on and thank you governor thanks for coming in and highlighting what is needed which is a a real strong voter integrity discussion in the legislature and bills coming here to your desk for your signature uh you mentioned a couple problems in harris county that i want to highlight one of them was yes we did not need to have two million absentee ballot forms mailed out uh that was decided by the texas supreme court so it's not just as you mentioned not just the federal uh courts that have been weighing in on this but they're using uh you know article six section four again of as a basis for many decisions and the reason why it's important is simply this um two million absentee ballot forms mailed out in the middle of an election would have caused in my opinion voter chaos because voters that had never seen this before would have been thinking yes that's what i should be able to do well no we're not a universal ballot after the ballot state like oregon and others and more importantly we didn't need that 2 million absentee ballots to set a record voter total in harris county okay which is only high by numerically but the highest percentage in over 30 years and so what i tried to do as as somewhat as a former election official is to add in bills that will be picked up uh by chairman kane and chairman hughes who's up running the state affairs as we speak which is why he's not here this morning and i called him my integrity seven well it turned out to be maybe one or two more but um but the first bill was to stop the absentee ballot mailing the integrity 7 really comes from my experience in watching elections and one of my pet peeves and i just can't believe we're still doing this in harris county is we're allowing people to be registered to private po boxes now nobody in this room lives in a two inch by three inch private po box but in harris county four thousand eight hundred eighty people nearly 5 000 people are still registered and in some ups stores like a 1302 wall it's over 50. and some 66 some 77 whatever it's it's preposterous that we are allowing this to happen because these people don't live at the ups store they don't live in a two by three inch po box but it's part of what we need to have which are just common sense reforms now i know chairman kane is going to talk about this because i think it's important that we also get the judiciary ready to go one election contest because that way if political parties of either of all types or candidates have an issue they should be able to get to a rocket dock at election election day or early voting my bill was sb 110 however term mccain has it in house bill 6 as well and finally i want to say that i think it's important concept of uniformity uh in elections where as an election official you want to make sure that people understand that there's uniformity what the laws are and that's why i filed a bill that would have uniform election laws in the state that i think are picked up both in house bill 6 as well as in senate bill 7 just to have seven to seven hours for early voting um and obviously for election day that would increase the number of hours in rural and some cases suburban texas it may decrease from what the attempt was in harris county but again i don't think that that was something that would be looked on by anything but a positive because everyone can uh can can view those hours and and whether they're working a shift or not they've got a chance to work on that during work on that effort over the weekend etc so i don't think there's any denial of voter rights with that i think uniformity is what we need in texas so rural voters coming home to work have the same access as as urban voters now with that i want to pass it back to you governor as it's your press release right you can i mean conference so you can pass it to the i'm going to pass it to uh chairman kane thank you governor abbott and senator bettencourt house bill 6 is part of a a larger package in the house uh where we will be where we be you know seeking to ensure the integrity of our electoral process since speaker felin had named me as chair of the house committee on elections uh i've met with multiple members of the house um discussed bills and we're working really close together both both sides of the aisle to see what they want to have done this session you know the house is i would say is the closest to the people house members have heard from our constituents we filed bills based on the things that they've heard from them and i believe it's again it's incumbent on the texas legislature to get this right that elections the bedrock of our republic should be free fair and secure at the main point of house bill 6 the very beginning is this idea that we should have standardized uniform elections that the rules are the rules what the legislature said and how an election should be conducted that's the rule it's predictable everyone should know that you know in the texas house right now we've got members that are rural and urban and there's different rules that apply depending where you live i would say that a texan from lubbock should be able to move to harris county or liberty county and know when they'll vote and the times and hours of those voting again that makes it fair it helps rural texans feel like they have the same opportunity as urban texans we must of course snuff out fraud the idea that voter fraud is a myth has been disproven time and time again not only is it a duty of the texas legislature to rid ourselves of that as is said in article 6 section 4 of the texas constitution but we owe it to people in communities that can be easily taken advantage of by snuffing that out we're actually helping them you know the only form of voter suppression is when a illegitimate voter an ineligible voter casts a ballot when an eligible voter casts their ballot what they're actually doing is they're silencing the voice of an american citizen of someone that is eligible to vote it's wrong and we should stop it very good uh with that we'll take a few questions 11 14 one of the semifinals in there it seems to be a repeat of the vote of purge issues that we had two years ago it has a line in there about people putting in driver's license requests when they were not legal citizens yet and eligible to vote but there's no limit on the time window of when an election official would have to act on that are we just not doing the same thing we did two years ago were people who 20 years ago may not have been legal but have since become legal citizens are going to be targeted jeremy no as a former election official you have to scrub all that data and you have to look at every individual data stream to make sure you understand what it means what 114 does is allows the ability for secretary of state to do cross checks with data but how you do it is up to good operational control as well as rule making now the important thing is was i did i did uh uh you know purges as well as uh roll cleanup as far back as 1998 when i came in as a voter registrar we had 50 000 deceased and felon registrations and by in 1998 we had that number was knocked down by well over 90 percent by the year 2000 so you always look at what your data is and specifically you have to use the dps data very carefully to make sure granularity you understand that because for example felons you know because of their term of service they can come back but so you have to look at their probation period so so all that does is allow the the event occur but it must be done with extreme detention to detail but did we do that in 2019 weren't those same rules in place when you asked no they just need to do it this bill was not in place and those same rules were not in place and so that's we're trying to provide structure to that because because look keeping the voter role clean is the first part of integrity in the voter process if you don't have a voter roll with integrity then your election is open to fraud and questioning so uh so everything that's on this bill is from on that bill as well is from my understanding as a former elections official of how to do it how to do it right well when you when you talk about talk to the bottom it's a little bit more convoluted uh what we look for and what we've seen in the past uh is that election fraud takes place i have no doubt that it took place here in the state of texas we wait for allegations to be made we don't root it out ourselves allegations are submitted to the secretary of state's office as well as to the attorney general's office and then investigations are conducted what we have found in the past there have been some local elections the outcome of which was altered by election fraud that took place right now i don't know how many or if any elections in the state of texas in 2020 were altered because of voter fraud what i can tell you is this and that is any voter fraud that takes place sows seeds of distrust in the election process the more distrust in the election process the more that it challenges the fundamentals of democracy itself there is an obligation not only in the texas constitution but as articulated by the united states supreme court that we remove that distrust by ensuring that we do all we can to ensure that every eligible voter will be able to cast a vote but no one will be able to cast an illegal how do we ensure voter accuracy of machines and the allowance of the observers that are partial and hand counting would you start over again how can we ensure the accuracy of our voting machines right and the allowance of observers partial observers and hand counting sure go ahead there are bills on on that exact thing one you'd ask about the impartiality of hand counting we've uh we've got legislation in both chambers that ensure that people can properly observe and and watch to see how those things are being done we've got legislation that that require um paper ballots versus mail and ballots to be stored securely in separate locations but most importantly of all is to define who can be present to to watch these tabulations so that people do not feel as though maybe something funny is going on behind the scenes again the overarching goal of this is to restore the public's trust that uh that when they went and voiced their concern in the direction of their government they felt like their voice would be heard we the the polling numbers are very clear that a majority of republicans and democrats want to see election reforms that rebuild their faith in the electoral process and if i could add there's two important concepts here one is verifiable paper trail which is in both the senate bill and the house bill that's an important part of an election process because you get the advantage of a direct digital machine as well as a paper ballot verification of it and two i have a bill that i'm basically calling the poll watcher sunshine bill which is 1591 which talks about all the reasons why we need uh poll watchers but look poll watchers should be available to look at any time and observe because that really is sunshine into the process and irrespective of a party they should be have access to where wherever it's in rural suburban or urban america it doesn't matter they should have 100 access all political parties uh poll watchers and candidates that should governor abbott you said the objective is very simple to ensure that every eligible voter gets a vote you though seeming to sort of base this on this feeling that you want to give uh inside you want to give voters the feeling that they're having the exact same amount of access as urban voters but i mean there's facts there too right population density how do you i guess how do you justify some of these changes that you want to make to people who are in more population dense areas that may not have the same opportunities as far as shift working lines that they may have to wait into you know there is a difference in simple things when it comes to rural and urban voters well there are bills on the subject to ensure that polling locations are distributed evenly throughout counties so for example in some areas in texas someone may have to drive 50 miles to get to a polling location urban counties don't have that problem and so there is data to support this idea that they should feel like they had the same opportunity to easily be able to go and cast their vote so also i'll add and then senator bettencourt may want to add more and that is it's a fair point that it is more dense and more populous in harris county uh than it is in some rural county but it's also true that there are far more voting locations in harris county than there are elsewhere we do want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to vote and that is why we have this early voting process that goes on seven days a week for long hours every single day to make sure that someone does have the opportunity to vote and then that's on top of the opportunity to vote on election day so there's so many days to vote that's one reason why we did have a record number of votes cast this past election you know there was always this mantra that texas was a non-voting state when an all-time record and the number of people who voted this last time because voters are more engaged and we expect that high volume of voting to continue and just uniformity transparency consistency wherever voters are they should be having the same access to to that type of voting activity for early voting and the fact that our current pattern in law right now is to have uh uh you know well over 10 days of early voting in a row so uh even in an urban area everybody can access a poll from seven to seven seven a.m to seven i want to ask you about your p.m to lieutenant governor patrick sure um you said that uh you you weren't opposed you weren't the puc cannot change bills retroactively uh from earth but are you against the idea of retroactively changing those bills out there changing those billing rates retroactively and maybe hurting some utilities but helping others well and for one there's a constitutional provision on that it's in the texas bill of rights section 16 where you cannot do things retroactively section 17 involves takings of property section 16 also concerns impairing the obligation and contracts and so it's very complex and that's exactly why we need hearings to determine would there be a taking would there be an impairment of a contract that has now already been executed and so these are very complex issues and that's that's exactly why the legislature is the right body to investigate this to weed through all these complexities and to make sure that if legislation is passed it will satisfy the requirements of the texas constitution thank you all thank you