Failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke spoke out on Monday to discuss the Texas Legislature’s election integrity bill, which Democrats were able to block by staging a walkout. O’Rourke claimed that the bill to ensure more security in the state’s elections is akin to the poll tax and literacy tests that were used years ago to stop black Americans from voting.

“[I]t’s worth remembering that our democracy is the exception and not the rule in world history, and the exception on the planet today, and as hard-fought as this democracy was won, we can so easily lose it with provisions like this one,” O’Rourke said while appearing on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. “But I also want to call attention to some of these seemingly innocuous provisions like closing polling places in Texas or quote/unquote ‘standardizing elections.’”

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“You know, the poll tax 100 years ago was somewhat innocuous-sounding,” he added. “The literacy test, the counting the number of jelly beans in a jar, but in every instance, they were used to try to stop black Texans and African-Americans throughout the former Confederacy from being able to use their rights to vote. And in that same way, ending souls to the polls and closing polling places in predominately African-American neighborhoods is doing the exact same thing in 2021. And I do think if you connect it to all of these other provisions in other states, you see the greatest attack on multiracial democracy since Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the voting rights act into law in 1965.”

This comes after The Associated Press reported that O’Rourke is considering running for governor of Texas again.

“Impatience is not the word for it,” said Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa. “But anxious is.”

“I told him that I thought that we needed a strong candidate for governor and he certainly fit that mold, and that, in my opinion, if anybody could beat Abbott, he could beat him,” Hinojosa added, referring to the Republican Governor Gregg Abbott.