Editorial
Hispanics need honest elections
By Trey Newton
April 19, 2021
Several years ago, the League of United Latin American Citizens sued one of Texas’ two major political parties. In its lawsuit, LULAC accused that party of systemically disenfranchising Hispanic voters for decades because of our race. If I didn’t tell you which party LULAC sued, you would probably assume it was the Republicans. Most media and Democrats bash everything Republicans do and say. When the Republican-led legislature passed voter ID a few years ago, the Democrats and the media decried the law saying it would suppress Hispanic votes.
That didn’t happen. In the elections that followed, the Hispanic (and Black) vote totals actually increased.
Voter ID has long enjoyed majority support in the Hispanic community for a very good reason: Hispanics have fought too hard to allow any doubt to creep in on our elections. Everyone’s votes must count. Our elections must be secure. Did anyone who predicted voter ID doom ever acknowledge they got it wrong and apologize? Of course not. They moved on to the next controversy, and if there wasn’t one handy, they made one up.
That’s what’s happening now as Texas considers tightening up our election laws. Managing elections is the province of the states. The Constitution leaves that power in the hands of the states for very good reasons. The states are closer to the people. The states are far better positioned to know what works and what doesn’t within their respective borders than a distant federal government can ever be. Dispersing elections among the states enhances security similar to how a distributed computer network does. It’s more difficult to hack thousands of local elections than a few centrally controlled ones. The states can check the power of the federal government and each other. We’ve seen throughout the COVID pandemic just how important state authority really is. Without states having real authority, all of us here in Texas might have been under the bootheel of the likes of Gov. Gavin Newsom or Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Both of them face scandals and their citizens are fleeing to the free states, mainly Florida and Texas. The conduct of the 2020 elections in several key states left too much doubt as to the validity and legitimacy of that election.
Rasmussen reports that 51% of Americans now doubt the 2020 election. That’s a slim majority that now feels disenfranchised. This is toxic to our republic. It was avoidable. Several key states changed election rules in dubious ways and blamed COVID. Whether those lastminute changes actually affected election outcomes or not, they created a level of election doubt we haven’t seen in 20 years.
In the wake of this past election, Texas and a few other states are considering reforms that would enhance our confidence that each citizen has the opportunity to cast their vote, and only legal votes counted. That’s it.
But we’re hearing the same noise we heard during the voter ID debate. “It’s voter suppression!” “It’s Jim Crow all over again!” Even corporate America is getting into the act now, acting as a hysterical arm of the Democratic Party.
Only one party has a history of systemically disenfranchising Hispanic voters in Texas. That party uses politiqueras and vote harvesters in the Valley as it has for decades to cheat in its own primaries. That party lost ground in 2020 and even lost an entire county that it once counted as a lock. That was Starr County, which voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The party that LULAC sued, and defeated, is the same party that is crying foul now that Texas is working to shore up its elections.
That’s the Democratic Party. LULAC accused the Democrats of using their two-step system of selecting party convention delegates to lock us out of power. A federal court unanimously agreed that that was exactly what the Democrats were doing. The Democrats do know all about Jim Crow. That was their racist regime.
Don’t be fooled. The Democrats have used their two-step primary and many other means to control and suppress the Hispanic vote here for decades. They think Hispanics all think exactly the same way and haven’t noticed how radical, antifamily and anti-freedom they have become. But Tejanos have always stood for freedom and they’re voting where our true values are now — with the Republicans. This has the Democrats terrified. They deserve it.
We all deserve to have our votes count, Senate Bill7 working through the legislature will help ensure that they will. We’ve fought too hard to let the Democrats corrupt our elections and stifle our voice — again.
Trey Newton is PAC director and Treasurer for the Hispanic Republicans of Texas.