Tesla Will Have to Ship Its Texas-Built Cars Out of State to Sell Back to Texans
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Which of these actually have anything to do with securing elections?
• Bans drive-through voting.
• Cuts the allowed hours for early voting. Some counties had been having some early voting days with extended hours (including 24 hours in Harris county) to make it easier for shift workers who could not get off work during normal early voting hours to vote.
• A recent version changed the formula for determining how many polling places to have on election day, but only for counties over a certain population limit. It would greatly reduce the number of places to vote in those counties (which, no doubt coincidentally, are counties that tend to vote Democratic and the reductions are largely in black and Latino areas of those counties). (I think this one was removed in the House, but was still on the table for the reconciliation between the House and Senate).
They have failed to document any security issues related to any of these, or even offered any plausible hypothesis as to how they could cause security problems.
The only thing that actually ties all the things they are changing together is that when done in Democratic counties they increase turnout, especially minority turnout. It's pretty hard to believe that this is just a coincidence.
But Tesla always sold their cars directly, there is no risk that they will compete with any third party dealership because they do not make deal with them. That is why that law does not make sense to be applied to Tesla. Its a shame Texas define themselves as one of the most free states and still have this law
Today, when it's trivial to price compare online between different offerings from different OEMs, the entire structure of dealership laws exists to keep the large donations from those businesses flowing to politicians. I watched an online video of a Texas committee meeting with the public, and lobbyists, considering allowing such direct sales. The thing that jumped out to me was the political grandstanding about how dealerships donate "so much money to little league baseball teams, etc.", with no mention of their own significant reception of such monies, and with no discussion that removing the middleman of dealerships would mean less money extracted from the buyer to pay for all those shiny showrooms, meaning such money could be donated directly by consumers to their favorite organizations. But the most remarkable thing to me was watching the politicians greet the automobile dealers lobbyist with some pleasure by name when she got up to talk and mentioning how often they saw her.