This spring, the Texas Legislature outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the states 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 a lot of 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.
Their turnout in the 2018 midterms 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts Universitys Institute for Democracy & Higher Education was more than double the rate in the 2014 midterms, easily exceeding an already robust increase in national turnout. 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.
Not coincidentally, the barriers are rising fastest in political battlegrounds and places like Texas where one-party control is eroding. Students overwhelmingly lean Democratic, with three in four supportive of impeaching President Trump, according to an Axios/College Reaction poll released this month.
Some states have wrestled with voting eligibility for out-of-state students in the past. And the politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots. The threat to election integrity in Texas is real, and the need to provide additional safeguards is increasing, the states attorney general, Ken Paxton, said last year in announcing one of his offices periodic crackdowns on illegal voting. But evidence of widespread fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them.
Efforts to deprive any American of a convenient way to vote will have a chilling effect on voting, Nancy Thomas, the director of the Tufts institute, said. And efforts to chill college students voting are despicable and very frustrating.
The headline 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 drivers 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 nations highest. As early as 2011, the states Republican House speaker at the time, William OBrien, promised to clamp down on unrestricted voting by students, calling them kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.
Floridas 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. This year, the State Legislature effectively 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.