- Mar 14, 2007
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In Texas Republicans Suppress the Vote:
AUSTIN, Texas — At Austin Community College, civics is an unwritten part of the curriculum — so much so that for years the school has tapped its own funds to set up temporary early-voting sites on nine of its 11 campuses.
No more, however. This spring, the Texas Republican Legislature outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the state’s elections take place in three weeks, those nine sites — which logged many of the nearly 14,000 ballots that full-time students cast last year — will be shuttered. So will six campus polling places at colleges in Fort Worth, two in Brownsville, on the Mexico border, and other polling places at schools statewide.
“It was a beautiful thing, a lot of people out there in those long lines,” said Grant Loveless, a 20-year-old majoring in psychology and political science who voted last November at a campus in central Austin. “It would hurt all the students if you take those polling places away.”
The story at Austin Community College is but one example of a political drama playing out nationwide: After decades of treating elections as an afterthought, college students have begun voting in force.
Texas bars students from registering until two months before their 18th birthday, the nation’s most restrictive rule. The state’s voter ID law — among the most onerous, excludes college and university ID cards and only allows the use of out-of-state driver’s licenses that many students carry if voters sign a form swearing that they couldn’t reasonably acquire an accepted ID and convincingly explain why.
Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, students have suddenly emerged as a potentially crucial voting bloc in the 2020 general election.
And almost as suddenly, Republican politicians around the country are throwing up roadblocks between students and voting booths, determined to suppress the votes of Democratic voting blocks.
Not coincidentally, the barriers are rising fastest in political battlegrounds and places like Texas where one-party control is eroding. Students lean strongly Democratic: In a March poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, 45 percent of college students ages 18-24 identified as Democrats, compared to 29 percent who called themselves independents and 24 percent Republicans.
The Texas and National Republican politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots. Evidence of fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to block the vote of voters likely to oppose them.
Another Republican example is in New Hampshire. There, a Republican-backed law took effect this fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to establish “domicile” in the state by securing New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually.
The dots are not hard to connect: According to the Tufts study, six in 10 New Hampshire college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest. As early as 2011, the state’s Republican House speaker, William O’Brien, promised to eliminate voting by students, calling them “kids voting liberal.”
Florida’s Republican secretary of state outlawed early-voting sites at state universities in 2014, only to see 60,000 voters cast on-campus ballots in 2018 after a federal court overturned the ban. In 2019 the Florida State Legislature reinstated it, slipping a clause into a new elections law that requires all early-voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking” — an amenity in short supply on densely packed campuses.
North Carolina Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that confused the issue further — its requirements proved so cumbersome and confusing that major state universities were unable to comply. Much confusion remains, and fewer than half the state’s 180-plus accredited schools have sought to certify their IDs for voting.
Wisconsin Republicans also have imposed impossible restrictions on using student IDs for voting purposes. The Republican state law requires poll workers to check signatures only on student IDs, although schools issuing modern IDs that serve as debit cards and dorm room keys have removed signatures, which they consider a security risk.
The law also requires that IDs used for voting expire within two years. Modern college ID cards have four-year expiration dates. Students must also show proof of enrollment before being allowed to vote.
Deeply Republican Tennessee does not recognize student ID cards as valid for voting, and Republican legislators have now removed out-of-state driver’s licenses from the list of valid identifications.
