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Texas Matters: Confusion With Texas Voters And A Check-Up For Healthy Women Texas

How Election Day Chaos Hurts Texas Voters 

Long wait times, confusion about voter ID and questions about voter registration – these are just three of the barriers that potential voters ran into during the last November General Election.

That’s according to a new report from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a voting right advocacy group.

Cassandra Champion is a staff attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project and helped write the report “Texas Election Protection 2016: An overview of the challenges faced by Texas Voters in the Presidential Election.”

Giving Healthy Women Texas a Check-Up

It was about five years ago that Texas leaders decided to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood health clinics – despite that these clinics were not providing abortions and they were delivering needed health services to women across the state.

Texas leaders promised that it’s new program Healthy Women Texas would pick up the slack. Did that actually happen?

Texas is now requesting federal funding for Healthy Women Texas – and in its draft request it appears that Texas is falling short.  

Stacey Pogue is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

She reports that the Healthy Texas Women program has left thousands of low income women across Texas without necessary health services.

SB8 And How Texas Abortion Opponents Count On Slow Courts 

In the recent legislative session Texas lawmakers passed and Governor Abbott signed SB8 – which requires abortion providers to bury or cremate fetal and embryonic tissue. And bans – without exceptions for rape or incest - the procedure “dilation and evacuation” which medical experts testify is the safest and most common type of second trimester abortion.

SB 8 is expected to be challenged in Court. There are legal experts who say it won’t pass constitutional scrutiny of the supreme court. But Texas Observer staff writer Sophie Novack reports that doesn’t seem to matter. Her article is “How Texas Anti-Abortion Lawmaker Win even while losing in Court.”

David Martin Davies can be reached at dmdavies@tpr.org and on Twitter at @DavidMartinDavi