Texas Republican Party places 13 nonbinding advisory questions on the March primary ballot

By

Victoria Antram

The Texas Republican Party has placed 13 nonbinding advisory questions on the March 5 primary ballot. The Texas Democratic Party does not plan on placing any questions on primary ballots this year. The last time they did was in 2020.

An advisory question is a type of ballot measure in which citizens vote on a non-binding question. The largest difference between an advisory vote and any other type of ballot measure is that the outcome of the ballot question will not result in a new, changed, or rejected law. Rather, the advisory question symbolically makes heard the general opinion of the voting population regarding the issue at hand.

The propositions address the following topics:

  • Property taxes;
  • The border and immigration;
  • Foreign policy;
  • Access to gold and silver for use as legal tender;
  • Vaccine mandates;
  • Closed primaries;
  • Authority for the attorney general to prosecute election crimes;
  • Right to choose any type of school for a child’s education and a voucher program;
  • Proof of citizenship to register to vote; and
  • Ban on Texas sale of land to citizens, governments, and entities from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

The questions were adopted by the 64-member State Republican Executive Committee and published on Dec. 28.

The Texas Elections Code allows citizens to collect signatures for a petition to place a specific question before voters at the party’s general primary election. The required number of signatures is 5% of the total vote received by all candidates for governor in the party’s most recent primary election, which equates to 97,709 signatures for the 2024 ballot. The deadline to file the petition for the March 5, 2024, ballot was Dec. 10.

The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) filed a petition to place a question asking voters whether Texas should secede from the United States on Dec. 11. The Texas Republican Party rejected the petition because it did not meet the petition deadline and of the 139,000 signatures filed, only 8,300 were valid.

On Jan. 10, the TNM filed an emergency petition with the Texas Supreme Court seeking to reverse the party’s decision. TNM President Daniel Miller said, “We are prepared to take every possible legal action to get TEXIT on the March Primary ballot. Those who have suppressed the will of petition signers will be held accountable, and we will not back down.”

In 2022, the Texas Republican Party placed 10 nonbinding advisory questions on the March 1 primary ballot. All 10 were approved by voters with approval rates ranging from 75.63% on a question related to eliminating property taxes to 95.70% on a question related to citizen voting requirements.