This is the Tom Hartman program.

I'm Alive of this is Lala Wu, the co-founder and executive director of the Sister District

project at WebSideSisterDistrict.com bringing women into politics.

Sister underscore district is the Twitter handle as well as underscore Lala LA, Lala underscore

Wu, WU underscore Lala, welcome to the program, so glad to have you with us.

Can you give us the details of the proposed Texas legislation and why it's consequential?

Thanks Tom, so glad to be here.

Texas already has some of the toughest voting laws in the country and Republicans are trying

to make them even tougher and I think it's important to put this in a national context

that there have already been 17 states that have passed 28 laws restricting voting and

all of these are pushed by Republicans that are premised on the big lie that of course

somehow Biden didn't win the election and with the Texas law in particular, it truly

is a real parade of horrible and I think what's important to know here is that it's not

random, it's not just Republicans throwing spaghetti at the wall of what do they think

might restrict voters and in particular voters of color.

The background here is that in 2020 Harris County, which is where Houston is, they ruled

out a bunch of new measures during the pandemic to help people vote.

This includes drive-through voting, which one in 10 early voters took advantage of expanded

voting hours, they automatically sent ballots to eligible voters, they had 24 hour voting

in the form of drop boxes and what happened was that even though Republicans brought some

litigation to challenge it, voter of colors prevailed and they really benefited from these

expanded measures and there were the highest turnout in 30 years and now fast forward to

...