Registering Texas College Students to Vote: Challenges and Solutions
Earlier this month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made headlines with his lawsuits against Bexar and Travis counties for their efforts to reach unregistered voters with unsolicited mailings. More recently, a judge in Tarrant County unsuccessfully tried to eliminate voting on college campuses. Many Democrats see this as a concerted effort by Republicans to suppress voting, particularly among young Texans. But even before these recent challenges, registering and voting for college students in the Lone Star State hasn’t exactly been easy.
High school students in Texas have a straightforward opportunity to register before they even reach college. There’s a 1983 law that requires high schools to give out voter registration forms to eligible students, but it’s been estimated that only a quarter of Texas high schools are actually complying.
Is it difficult for young people to register and vote in Texas? If so, how difficult? Leslie Rangel looked into it for the recently launched Texas news website, The Barbed Wire, and she joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
Texas Standard: Texans can’t register to vote online. I think a lot of folks know that. I can see how that might complicate things for students if they go to college, say, in a different part of the state than their home address. How does voter registration work in that scenario?
Leslie Rangel: Yeah, it’s complicated. Right now, young people that are eligible to vote were born in 2006. That means this group of kids has never known what life is like without the Internet. So the notion that you can’t register to vote online is a really foreign concept for them. Then you add in, say you’re from Dallas, and you come to college in Austin. You want to register to vote back home because maybe you’re a little more informed on those issues. You would have to find a Deputy Registrar that is from Dallas County in order to register in the county that you want to vote in. So it seems that there are a lot of unnecessary steps or additional steps that make it challenging for students to vote. Sure, they can register in Travis County if they want to vote on the Travis County issues. But depending on what the students believe in, or what they might be informed about, it can get really complicated.
Organizations like MOVE Texas are really big on helping register students to vote, as well as keeping polling locations on Texas campuses. There’s also Powered by People. They are specifically pushing towards registering more students who lean more progressive. But they face some big challenges. For example, up at the University of North Texas, they’ve banned these types of organizations from coming into the classrooms before class and saying, “hey, we’re here to help register to vote.” They’re still on campus. They’ll still be tabling, and maybe on your way to lunch, you might catch one of them. But in terms of what the organizations are saying, it just seems that there’s a lot more red tape to go through.
That’s a great question. If you want something to happen, I’m sure you can make it happen. What some of these organizations argue is that student voting is more confusing than it needs to be. For example, up at Texas Tech, they have an early voting polling location, and it might be there for the duration of early voting. Then all of a sudden, on election day, it’s across campus. And so when I spoke to some of the folks at MOVE Texas, they said it just creates confusion more than anything. And then you consider that some students work multiple jobs. So, by the time they get to the early voting polling location and then they figure out they need to go all the way across campus, are they going to be late to work? Again, it’s creating little barriers that add up over time, and it just makes it more complicated to vote.
There’s a 2013 Supreme Court case that sort of changed the voting game in Texas. Could you tell us a little bit about it? What kind of changes to voting regulations have Texans seen in the last decade?
So we’re talking about Shelby County v. Holder. Before this decision, state and local governments could not pass laws or policies that denied American citizens the equal right to vote based on race. In 2013, parts of that were struck down. Any jurisdiction that had a history of discrimination previously had to ask for preclearance to do any sort of changes in voting procedures. That was taken away, and this, again, was set in place so that it would not harm voters who were in communities of color or who were disenfranchised voters. And so now, without that oversight, it seems like Texas is on a roll of really trying to suppress voters.
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