PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas — As of Tuesday, October 21, Texas broke the five million votes cast, which means nearly a third of the Lonestar State's16.9 million registered voters have already cast their ballot in the 2020 election. But what about the thousands of others who may not have the ability to participate in early voting?
If voting during a pandemic wasn't difficult enough, imagine being a student on the campus of Prairie View A&M. Students here don't have access to on-campus voting until Election Day. That's an issue some candidates for city council have a problem with.
"If the polls were at the MSC, there would be, no doubt, for sure, that we would be turning out in record numbers," said Nathan Alexander III, who is running for Prairie View City Council. "Just the simple fact that students are in the MSC on a daily basis."
Alexander said he believes not having an on-campus polling location during early voting is a tactic of the ongoing voter suppression many Prairie View A&M students said they feel.
"Having students walk another 500 feet to the Waller County Community Center is a huge inconvenience to students, especially in the midst of a pandemic," Alexander said.
He said the Prairie View student vote holds a lot of weight in any election due to the amount of students registered on campus and because Waller County knows this, it's trying to hold students back.
"It's a scare tactic," he said. "It's a way to suppress the vote, and it's a way to make people feel discouraged." Instead of being discouraged, Alexander said students should push to the polls as if their lives depended on it.
The court case Symm v. United States in 1979 allowed college students across the nation to vote where they live. It was initiated by a lawsuit held against Waller County by Prairie View A&M students.
"So what’s ironic is that Prairie View helped establish the precedence of all students voting where they go to college, and they’re still struggling to vote on their college campus," said Dr. Melanye Price, who is a political science professor at Prairie View A&M. "Prairie View is one of the largest voting blocks and its a densely gathered population because it's on campus and so it's easy to know that they’re going to vote and to know how to find them."
Dr. Price, who graduated from Prairie View A&M in 1994, said she has not seen any changes in the ongoing fight to have access to early voting on the campus. "How is it that we established this as national law and we have to fight every single election about where those voting booths are going to be?" she added.
Dr. Price said students of Prairie View are a large contributor to the increase in business for Waller County and they deserve the same access to early voting as any other resident.
"We have been here participating, ready to share our voice, ready to be involved in local government, ready to figure out the ways in which we can contribute," Dr. Price said. "We pay our tax dollars in Waller County. We shop at stores in Waller County. We rent land from landlords in Waller County. We are a big business boom for them. "Why can’t we also participate in the way decisions are made?"
When asked how polling locations are chosen, Waller County Election Commissione, Christy Eason, said they are approved by the Commissioner's Court in the summer. That means Prairie View students are at home and can't speak up.
In the 2020 election, students will have access to the on-campus shuttle to vote early at the Waller County Community Center and on-campus voting will be held on November 3.