By Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune Feb. 16, 2023

By Sneha Dey, Alex Nguyen and Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune. Texas lawmakers won’t gavel in for the new legislative session until January, but they got their first chance to file bills Monday.

By Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune SAN ANTONIO — A new Texas law that keeps local election officials from encouraging voters to request mail-in ballots likely violates the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Feb. 11.

By Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune Stricter voting rules enacted by Republican lawmakers last year continue to foil Texans trying to vote by mail in the upcoming primary, with hundreds of completed ballots being initially rejected for not meeting the state’s new identification requirements.

By Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune Hundreds of Texans seeking to vote by mail in the upcoming March primary elections are seeing their applications for ballots rejected by local election offices trying to comply with stricter voting rules enacted by Texas Republicans last year.

By Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune Opening a second front in widening legal wars over redistricting, a coalition of mostly Hispanic, Democratic members of the Texas House filed suit in state court Wednesday challenging the constitutionality of the new political map for the state House.

By Cassandra Pollock, The Texas Tribune Disabled, elderly and non-English speaking voters risk disenfranchisement under Texas' new voting law passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday challenging the legislation known as Senate Bill 1.

By Allyson Waller, The Texas Tribune Texas’ transgender student athletes will be restricted from playing on K-12 school sports teams that align with their gender identity under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday.

Hours after the Texas Legislature released the first draft of the redistricting map, Fair Maps Texas held a press conference featuring a diverse group of Texans who criticized gerrymandering and called for a fair redistricting process. The Texans demanded better representation as they spoke out on the impact that the current districting map has imposed on them and urged U.S Congress to pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act.  Watch the full news conference here:  

In theory, the 2021 cycle of redistricting is about revising district boundaries to evenly distribute Texas’ fast-growing population and ensure voters have fair representation. But with the mapmaking in the hands of politicians, and their individual electoral survival at stake, redistricting has also become an exercise in political rigging. The state Senate released its first proposed map on Saturday and the special legislative session in which redistricting will be featured formally begins Monday.