Return of early voting to University of Houston, Texas Southern considered a ‘win’ among students – Houston Public Media

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Jordan Jones plans to cast a ballot for the first time this fall. And for the 20-year-old student at Texas Southern University, a historically Black school in Houston’s Third Ward, voting in November’s general election figures to be much easier than it would have been during the March primary.

Texas Southern, which first became a polling location when Harris County implemented countywide voting centers in 2019, did not serve as an early voting site for the primary. But it is doing so for the Nov. 5 presidential election, with early voting starting Oct. 21.

“It’s very important,” Jones said. “Our vote really matters. It’s a lot of us. We want to have a say so. If you want to have a say so, you’ve got to get up and vote.”

The nearby University of Houston, where the number of students, staff and faculty tops 50,000, also got its early voting location back for the upcoming election after not holding early voting in March. Losing out on early voting was a “disappointment,” according to UH vice chancellor Jason Smith, who said he lobbied the Harris County Clerk’s Office to bring it back with the help of some local elected officials.

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“It’s super important to have that location,” UH student body president Diego Arriaga said. “It promotes students to vote, the community to vote, the accessibility of voting. If it wasn’t on campus, I don’t see many of our students going out of their way finding a location off campus to go vote.”

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A total of 12 colleges and universities in Harris County will hold early voting this fall. That could be considered a win for student voting access at a time when some Texas lawmakers want to remove or limit voting on campuses.

State Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Republican in the Hill Country, proposed a state law last year that would have eliminated voting at colleges in Texas, citing safety concerns related to mass shootings. And earlier this month, a Republican county judge in Fort Worth made a failed attempt to remove voting at some colleges there, with county GOP leaders later saying that would have improved their chances of winning in November, according to the Texas Tribune.

“There are definitely folks in the state that want to suppress the vote and think of the vote in partisan terms,” said Alex Birnel, the advocacy director for MOVE Texas, a nonprofit that focuses partly on voting rights. “Student polling locations in particular have been under threat.”

There is a history of voter suppression at Prairie View A&M, a historically Black university just northwest of Houston in Waller County. Students there were close to having their votes diluted in August, when county officials considered a request by local Patriot Party members to add two early voting locations in mainly white, conservative areas.

The county backed away from the idea, with elections administrator Christy Eason saying an early voting expansion at that point would have been too costly, too difficult logistically and ultimately unfair. The proposal also prompted pushback from a group of Black Democrats.

“We wanted parity,” said Dr. Denise Mattox, chair of Waller County’s Democratic party. “If they wanted two early voting center sites, then we wanted two.”

Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, a Black Democrat who graduated from Texas Southern, said “nobody is suppressing anybody’s vote” under her administration. She also said there was “never a time when UH and TSU were not going to be considered for polling locations.”

Hudspeth did not specify why there was no early voting at the Houston universities during the primary. She said polling locations can change based on the type of election, the county’s resources and manpower, site availability and past voter turnout.

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Arriaga and Smith at UH both said relatively low turnout in previous elections could have been a factor. Among the 68 early voting locations for the November 2023 election, there were 41 sites that had more early voters than Texas Southern’s 2,145. UH drew fewer early voters during that election, 1,545, but that was more than 17 other locations.

Smith said he’ll be encouraging both students and staff at UH to better utilize its early voting location this fall. Much the same is true at neighboring Texas Southern, where student Ayanna Wilmore and her sorority have been holding voter registration events ahead of the Oct. 7 deadline.

“The fact that people in Houston can vote on campus is definitely a win,” Wilmore said. “We’ve just got to keep it a win. We’ve just got to make sure we do our part to utilize that polling location to make sure there is no reason to take it away from us.”