Texas Republicans are bringing their voter suppression bill back in a special session, weeks after Democrats blocked their first try by walking out. 

The good news is that Republicans dropped a key provision targeting Black voters: a ban on early voting before 1 PM on Sundays, which is when many Black churches run “Souls to the Polls” programs. The bad news is … just about everything else. Republicans want to ban drive-through voting, 24-hour voting, and late-night voting, all methods of voting used disproportionately by voters of color. Republicans want to slap criminal penalties on election officials who solicit mail-ballot applications, send out unsolicited applications or pre-fill applications. They are pushing for strict signature-matching requirements that could toss out valid votes.

And the Republicans want a voter intimidation provision, in the form of giving partisan poll watchers “free movement” within polling sites (with the exception that they can’t actually loom over someone in the act of filling out a ballot) and making it a criminal offense to obstruct their view or keep them too far away to observe “in a manner that would make observation not reasonably effective.” In other words, Republicans want to give Republican poll watchers the ability to threaten election officials with criminal charges if they don’t get exactly what they want, after, in 2020, poll workers reported 44 incidents of inappropriate behavior by poll watchers in Harris County alone.

Republicans claim that these measures are all necessary to crack down on election fraud. They claim this after the state’s Republican attorney general dedicated 22,000 hours of staff time to hunting for fraud and finding nothing criminal.

Texas Democrats are vowing to keep up their fight to block these voter suppression measures, up to and including walking out again to deny Republicans the quorum they need. In response, Republicans have floated the possibility of locking all legislators inside the state capitol. But when Texas Democrats blocked the last voter suppression effort, they made clear that they cannot do this all on their own. “Federal lawmakers need to get their shit together and pass the For The People Act,” one lawmaker tweeted at the time.

Civil rights leaders, meanwhile, are pressuring the White House to put more emphasis on voting rights, making their case in a long meeting with President Joe Biden. 

“We must have the president use his voice, use his influence, use his power—and use what he clearly understands about this moment,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “The president understands us to be in a moment of peril in terms of our democracy. And that means that we have to put all the options on the table, figure out what can work, keep talking, keep pressing and move forward.”