Election judges and voters who have a license to carry handguns are permitted to perform their Election Day duties while armed under the law.
Republican Rep. Carrie Isaac House Bill 1128 – The early voting clerk, who serves as an election judge during the early voting from the firearms ban at the polling station, touched on the debate between the bill’s author and Democrat Rep. Vicki Goodwin.
“Why do you want a gun at the polling station?” Goodwin asked.
Isaac responded that threats and violence directed at electoral workers have been on the rise in recent years, putting election security at risk.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to recruit and maintain workers because of the increased threat,” she said. “These are not isolated cases.”
Isaac will bolster her claim that voting workers could be targeted by violent individuals, referring to the threat to former Tarrant County election manager Haider Garcia after the 2020 election.
In a written testimony to the US Senate Judiciary Committee in 2022, Garcia said the threat came after Democrat Joe Biden began questioning the legitimacy of the outcome of the presidential election that forced Republican Donald Trump out of the White House. Tarrant County has become lightning, he said. Because it has been a GOP base for a long time, but Biden has slightly surpassed Trump in the final vote count.
Garcia told the committee that threats directed him include interfering with social media posts such as “catching him down” and “Let his vibrant body hang publicly until the maggots drip from their mouths.”
However, Goodwin questioned how voting workers could handle or eliminate such threats by carrying handguns while voting.
“Do you think there could be more threats for voters to hit a gun?” she asked.
Isaac put the question aside and said only election judges allowed to carry handguns will be allowed to bring firearms into the poll. And she added that the gun is probably hidden and will not stand out to voters.
“We’re safer when people carry firearms,” ​​Isaac said.
According to Texas Criminal Code, only supervised or out-of-line law enforcement officers can bring firearms to the polling station. According to the Brennan Judicial Center, Texas is one of 12 states and Washington, D.C., and bans firearms at polling stations.
HB 1128, passed by the House of Representatives by 85-57 votes, will be sent to Texas Senators. This doesn’t take a month to decide whether to submit the bill for the ballot before the 2025 legislative session ends on June 2nd.
