Karl Rove: Democrats decided to go to Washington and claim this is about racism and suppression
Fox News contributor Karl Rove discusses voter integrity measures on 'Your World'
Karl Rove, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under President George W. Bush, joined Neil Cavuto on "Your World" Wednesday to make an argument about Democrats' true intentions in spearheading election measures in Texas.
KARL ROVE: There are two big issues dominating this discussion in Texas. They have to do with practices that were used last year in Harris County, home to Houston, Texas. And they involve two things: Harris County on its own decided it was going to have 24-hour voting, it was going to allow people to vote for 24 consecutive hours, which is not allowed under state law. They had to come up with a weird interpretation, and they had one day of that. This law that has been proposed in Texas would make it clear that's not allowed because it's expensive. You have to put in election officials, you have to recruit volunteer election judges. The parties have to nominate people. And that's going to be hard for a lot of counties to do. Only one county out of 254 did it.
The other one is drive-thru voting. Texas has a very explicit law that says the only people who can use drive-thru voting are people who are physically unable to get to the polls unassisted. Harris County decided on its own [that] it was going to set up eight locations, mostly in Democrat areas of the county, and allow people to drive-thru vote. Now, why do we not like that? Because who's in the car checking while you vote? And so those are the two big issues here.
…Now, why do we have the Democrats say this is needed? Because they say if we don't have these laws, it's voter suppression. Now, the problem is this: Harris County is the only county in the state of Texas that had these 24-hour votes and drive-thru voting. Harris County turnout is smaller than the statewide average. If this is so important to turnout, why is Harris County below the statewide average? In fact, there are 130 counties that had neither 24-hour voting nor drive-thru voting that had a higher turnout percentage. And one of them was, interestingly enough, Rep. [Michelle] Beckley's district. Her county of Denton had a higher turnout than Harris County without having these additional expensive and unnecessary programs. And 91 counties included a large number of South Texas, largely Hispanic counties in South Texas and South Central Texas had a bigger improvement in turnout between 2016 and 2020 than did Harris County.
Look, this is all about politics. Democrats were going to lose, so they decided they'd go to Washington and claim that this was all about racism and suppression. And that's not what it's about at all. In fact, this bill increases the number of hours that people are allowed to vote during our early voting period in Texas and requires more counties to have weekend voting. We go from a requirement that the counties with 100,000 population have weekend early voting during our 13 days of early voting to every county with more than 55,000 voters. So, look, this is all about national politics and about trying to get to basically bust up the rules in Texas and for no good reason at all. And the kind of language that these people are using, Representative Beckley and others, voter suppression, and Jim Crow and racism is ridiculous.
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