Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday (September 7) promulgated an electoral law strongly criticized by Democrats who see it as a restriction on access to the ballot box, less than a week after the entry into force of a controversial law on the abortion in this great American state.
Read alsoTexas seeks to ban abortion
The electoral law aims, according to its Republican defenders, to make the elections safer as well as to harmonize the rules in this state of 29 million inhabitants.
But she is entering a fundamental movement in the United States, fueled by the unfounded allegations of massive fraud in the presidential election of 2020 propagated by the Republican loser Donald Trump: since January, at least 18 states have adopted 30 restrictive electoral laws and dozens others are under consideration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice think tank.
Texas law notably prohibits
drive-in
voting
, which had spread in 2020 during the pandemic to avoid long queues, and it establishes many restrictions on postal voting.
"An assault on democracy" for Joe Biden
For the detractors of the text, these restrictions mainly target provisions facilitating the voting of minorities, in particular African-Americans, generally more favorable to the Democrats.
The latter promised to launch legal remedies to block the law.
But Governor Greg Abbott said he was "
extremely confident
" that the law would "be
validated in court
."
"
It facilitates access to the vote,
" he hammered Tuesday in front of the cameras in the city of Tyler, Texas.
“
No one with the right to vote will be deprived of the opportunity to vote.
On the other hand, it complicates the task of cheaters who want to submit an illegal ballot.
"
Read alsoUnited States: Texas adopts controversial voting access law
The Republican governor stressed that the new law would allow voting for twelve days before an election and that some voters could get to vote on their working time (federal elections are held on Tuesday in the United States).
Without convincing the Democrats: this law "will
further complicate
" access to the ballot box for Texans, denounced their leader in the House of Texas, Chris Turner.
During the review of this law in the spring, Joe Biden denounced an "
assault on democracy
".
Some highly controversial provisions have since been withdrawn.
It was in the same vast southern state of the United States that a law making the vast majority of voluntary terminations illegal came into force last week. Here too, the Biden administration denounced the law but the White House has few leverage to block it.
