Ask yourself: If Texas voters are truly clamoring loud and clear, in broad daylight, for the voting restrictions that GOP leaders tell them will protect election security, why do lawmakers insist on passing the legislation in the dead of night?

There’s a certain irony, and brazen hypocrisy, in the fact that Republican senators were perfectly comfortable voting past midnight last month on a bill that would ensure Texas voters cannot do the same at the late-night polling places Republicans are trying to ban.

Of course, resorting to desperate and unusual methods to pass controversial pet legislation is not novel in Texas. Back in 2016, the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals remarked with obvious skepticism at the “virtually unprecedented” treatment officials gave Texas’ harsh voter ID legislation in 2011 — such as bestowing it with emergency designation, suspending rules to expedite, bypassing regular committee processes in both chambers. The court said the “radical procedural departures” lent credence to accusations of “discriminatory intent.”

You don’t say.

A voting bill that truly protects people’s rights instead of raiding them doesn’t need a shroud of darkness or legislative chicanery to prevail. It doesn’t run from the sun or shrivel under scrutiny. Only lies do.

The biggest problem Republican lawmakers have in pushing restrictive voting legislation in the name of integrity is that they themselves have none.

The latest example came Thursday, as the House Elections Committee abruptly took up Senate Bill 7, the upper chamber’s main voter-suppression legislation, without any warning and leaving no room for public comment. The bill aids voter intimidation by letting partisans film voters they find suspicious and takes aim at voting innovations that helped increase turnout in blue Harris County, including drive-thru voting.

Chairing the Elections Committee is none other than state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, a young lawyer who earned his stripes in Texas-style voter integrity politics by proudly tweeting a photo of himself in November, in aviator glasses and a cowboy hat pulled low, announcing that he was headed to Pennsylvania to join Donald Trump’s quest to overthrow the presidential election through baseless allegations of voter fraud.

It surprised many when incoming House Speaker Dade Phelan entrusted Cain with his first chairmanship. It has been less surprising that Cain’s excellent adventure in committee leadership has, well, flunked most heinously. Last week, Cain blindsided fellow lawmakers by introducing a motion to substitute SB 7 with the language of his own bill, HB 6. His move, to hear him reason it, required no public discussion, since the committee had already discussed and approved the House bill.

Cain played it coy as Democrats sought clarification and questioned whether this would gut SB 7 and replace it wholesale with the language in HB 6. “I wouldn’t say that,” he responded.

Cain, speaking over lawmakers’ objections that they didn’t have time to consider the substituted language, likely would have bullied through if not for his fellow Republican, state Rep. Travis Clardy, of Nacogdoches, refusing to cast a vote.

After the committee reconvened later that day, Clardy supported the measure and the revised SB 7 — to mirror HB 6 — passed on a party-line vote. Still, it was nice that however briefly, at least one Republican on the committee believed that if you claim election bills are about honest elections, you should show a little honesty in discussing them.

In March, Chairman Cain — yet, again — broke with legislative rules in a decidedly less successful scheme. He left about 200 people who traveled to the Capitol to testify on HB 6 twiddling their thumbs after he strayed from procedure in a hasty attempt to block testimony from Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus.

In April, the Senate approved SB 7 in the middle of the night — after a slew of amendments that few had a chance to read in full — with few people watching. As reported by the Chronicle, lawmakers adjourned at 1:39 a.m. April 1, then cleverly reconvened one minute later at 1:40 a.m. to declare a new legislative day, complete with a new roll call and a fresh prayer — thus complying with public notice rules without slowing down the bill’s passage.

“If you really think you’re securing the election, do it in the light of day,” says Emily Eby, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “If you really think you’re preserving the integrity of the ballot box, do it in front of Texans.”

Of course, Republican lawmakers don’t think anything of the sort. Not if they understand basic math, anyway. An analysis of voter fraud cases by this editorial board found that over the past 15 years and more than 94 million votes cast in Texas elections, the Texas Attorney General’s Office has prosecuted only 155 people, with few of them facing charges serious enough to warrant jail time.

The GOP’s true motivation is not preventing fraud in voting, but preventing broader voting across demographic lines from an electorate that’s growing younger and more diverse. The only threat at the polls is the GOP’s attempt to bar the door.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sent Thursday, Democrats on the elections committee expressed their dismay at Cain’s actions, and the GOP’s disregard for dissent.

“The viewpoints of minorities are an unimportant nuisance that is an obstacle to their continued control of Texas,” the legislators wrote.

The double meaning there is painfully clear, as minority voters — who tend to cast their ballots for Democrats — are the expressed target of voting restrictions.

Some might suggest that we take comfort in the fact that HB 6 doesn’t curb voter rights quite as much as SB 7. But that’s like choosing whether to take an ice pick or a chainsaw to democracy.

Texans should not be forced to suffer either when there is absolutely no cause — at least, no cause other than the partisan one that Republicans dutifully serve at Texans’ expense, in the wee hours, when they think you are sleeping.