A Texas Republican said proposed restrictions on Sunday voting were meant to let people go to church. Another claimed the whole thing was a typo.

• A Texas lawmaker claimed a provision of a proposed bill that limits Sunday voting was a typo.
• Rep. Travis Clardy told NPR the bill was supposed to allow Sunday voting to begin at 11 am, not 1 pm.
• The bill's sponsor, however, said the 1pm start time allowed election workers to go to church.
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A Texas state lawmaker claimed that a proposal to limit Sunday voting hours from 1 pm to 9 pm in a major GOP-backed voting bill, Senate Bill 7, was a typo after the bill's sponsor defended the provision.

"Call it a scrivener's error, whatever you want to," Rep. Travis Clardy told NPR's Steve Inskeep in a Tuesday interview. "I talked to our team yesterday, kind of regrouping of what happened. That was not intended to be reduced. I think there was a – you know, call it a mistake if you want to. What should have been 11 was actually printed up as one."

Democrats and civil rights groups decried that provision of Senate Bill 7 as a blatant attack on "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote drives popular in Black churches. But none of the Republicans who had a hand in drafting it raised the issue of a typo during debate on the bill over Memorial Day weekend.

Indeed, the bill's sponsor, Sen. Bryan Hughes, defended that specific provision, claiming that permitting Sunday voting after 1 pm was necessary to allow election workers to go to church before heading out to work the polls.

"Those election workers want to go to church, too," Hughes said during debate over the bill late on Saturday night, according to the Texas Tribune. "And so that's why it says 1 p.m. [and] no later than 9 p.m. You can make Sunday service and go after that."

Hughes also told Sen. Royce West, "You can correct me, but souls to the polls - I thought we went to church and ate lunch and then voted."

Both Hughes and Rep. Briscoe Cain, the chair of the House Elections Committee, now say that the goal of the bill is to expand Sunday voting across the board, and that they plan to change that provision when the legislature takes up the bill next, the Tribune reported.

In a dramatic Sunday night showdown, Democrats in the state House walked out of the chamber to ensure there wouldn't be the quorum necessary to vote on the bill. Their action blocked its passage and ran out the clock until midnight, the deadline for the final version of the bill to be adopted and sent to the governor's desk before the end of the legislative session.

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the Democrats who led the effort, told Insider on Monday that a group of minority lawmakers huddled on Sunday afternoon and decided to take the drastic action after they felt they were being steamrolled as Republicans tried to fast-track the bill's passage.

"It became more and more clear that Republicans were going to try to ram this down our throats, and there was widespread discussion about Republicans stopping the debate, silencing our voices, and forcing a vote, and I think that's when a lot of us said, 'this goes too far,'" he said.

Texas is one of just few states where the minority party in a state legislature can block legislation by walking out of a chamber to deny a quorum. The action by Democrats was only the fourth such legislative walkout in Texas' history.

The walkout followed weeks of revisions to the bill, drastic changes to its contents, and tension between the chambers over the proposal.

After Cain completely scrapped the bill's original contents and replaced Senate Bill 7 with the text of a different bill, House Bill 6, a conference committee from both chambers hashed out the differences between the bills behind closed doors.

"It's a complete 180 from House Bill 6, which was supposed to reflect the compromise," Martinez Fischer said of the version of SB 7 that came out of the conference committee.

The battle over Senate Bill 7, however, is far from over. Gov. Greg Abbott has already announced that he will call a special legislative session to revive Senate Bill 7 and other key priorities that didn't make it out of the last legislative session.

Martinez Fischer told Insider that from his perspective, "all options are on the table" for the special session.

"We have rules, we have procedures, we have our Texas constitution, and we will zealously apply those rules to represent our constituents," he said.