Texas Students Are Again Battling the Closure of a Campus Polling Place

[Nevilledog]

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Michael Barajas
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Students at TX's largest university have joined the perennial fight to get or keep campus polling places in this state, after county officials cut their early voting center for this year's midterm election

boltsmag.org
Texas Students Are Again Battling the Closure of a Campus Polling Place
Local officials’ decision to eliminate early voting at one of the nation’s largest universities underscores the perennial fight to get or keep campus polling places in Texas.
9:28 AM · Sep 15, 2022

https://boltsmag.org/texas-students-are-battling-the-closure-of-a-campus-polling-place-tamu-brazos/

Like many young people, Kristina Samuel started voting during college. She was a freshman biology student at Texas A&M University during the 2020 primaries, casting her first ballot that year at the Memorial Student Center in the heart of the school’s sprawling 5,200 acre campus.

Samuel left what she thought was enough time to vote on Election Day, planning to visit the student center between her biology lecture that afternoon and a lab later that evening. But when she got there, the line to vote wrapped around the building, which was the only polling place on campus. Samuel, who says she waited about three hours to vote, recalls being the only person in her friend group who waited to cast a ballot in the election.

“I only stayed because I just knew how important it was, but I know so many people who are already on the fence about voting or who see it as a chore,” Samuel said. “They’re not going to wait in that three hour line.”

Samuel, president of her university chapter of the voting rights group MOVE Texas, and other student activists have asked for a second campus polling place to accommodate the largest student body in the state, and one of the largest in the nation. This summer, however, local officials took the opposite approach. The Brazos County Commissioners Court in July decided to eliminate the student center as a polling place during the two weeks of early voting for the 2022 midterms. Now there will be nowhere on campus for students to vote between Oct. 24 and Nov. 4.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. So I guess Texas is so poverty stricken they can't afford enough polling places. Sarcasm

[TheRealNorth]

2. I don't see how any election that has such discrepancies in the time it takes to vote....

For PoC or Democratic-leaning voters and the MAGATS can be viewed as legitimate.

Time is money and making lines long to dissuade people from voting is akin to a poll tax.

[Walleye]

4. Yes, after all there is something called the equal protection clause.Used by SC to stop vote count

In the disastrous 2000 election. I thought using that clause for that was sort of insult to injury

[magicarpet]

3. If you have a propensity to vote Liberal and not Fascist.

Then Abbott and his boys will play peek-a-boo with your ballot box.

Abbott says - voting for Democrats should be like an elaborate, endless, and protracted game of whack-a-mole.

After they have tried and tried again without succeeding. They hopefully will eventually just get bored and move on to more pressing matters. Not being able to squander or waste their time chasing down a constantly moving goalpost of being able to vote.

Confront your (political) adversaries with such insurmountable odds,... then wear them down both mentally and physically to the point of total and absolute exhaustion.

Happy voters the Fascist way,.. one man - one vote - if you can negotiate the insurmountable obstacle course we have constructed designed to block your way to the polling place and the ballot box.

Reaching the pinnacles of entertainment for the fucking MAGA crowd of UN-AMERICANS & PROUD FASCISTS. Lusting for the next election time to come - so you can scheme and plot the many ways to deny your political adversaries their basic rights to vote and cast their ballot for counting.

Making a mockery of American Democracy in incremental and a myriad of differing ways.
The hallmark of today's new Fascist Republican Party.

[ret5hd]

5. Texas A&M is probably the most conservative...

university in Texas. I’m surprised they didn’t take all the voting booths from other campuses and put them all there.