Trouble in Texas: Students March for Voting Rights

I've been remiss in posting about this. As reported at the Houston Chronicle and Burnt Orange Report, earlier today, over 2,000 students from Prairie View A&M marched 7 miles from campus to the county courthouse to both cast an early ballot in the Texas primary and protest student disenfranchisement in Waller county.

The story is this - in January the county made a decision to radically reduce the number of early polling locations in the county to one. This was not a surprise. The county has a long history of voter suppression of students and people of color. This is from an email I received earlier:

• Supreme Court case that ruled against the county in 1979 where students at PVAMU were forced to take a questionnaire about personal questions in order to vote in Waller.
• In 1993 19 students were indited (charges were later dropped) for voter fraud as they lead massive voters registrations efforts on the campus of PVAMU.
• In 2004 the District Attorney told the students that they would be fined or could face jail time if they registered to vote in Waller County. The Attorney General of Texas intervened and the students were able to register.
• In 2006 Black Youth Vote!, The PVAMU student government association and a local county judge lead a registration effort to register hundreds of students on the campus and none of those students were on the rolls to vote for the mid-term elections. Apparently there was a "scandal" in the elections office and the matter was under investigation by the same office (district attorney's office) that told the students that they could not vote two years earlier.
• During the summer of 2007 Judge Dewayne Charleston had pledged to walk from PV to Austin in protest of the non-response from the Office of the Attorney General. This lead to roughly 300 students names (from the stack that was never put on the rolls in 2006) to be placed on the voting rolls in Waller county.
• Now (2008), the County is proposing to close all the early voting locations in the city of Prairie View with the university alone having over 8000 students and PVAMU being the largest employer in the county.
• The new proposal llocations for 3 days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) are still inadequate because students are not in town on weekends and it seems like a band aid to a SERIOUS problem with CONSISTENT student voter disenfranchisement in Waller and there has to be an outside intervention to protect the integrity of the elections for the students.

The response has been building for a while. The Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law took up the case on behalf of the students, the Obama campaign also supported the students - writing the Department of Justice on their behalf, registering about 3,000 young voters in the area, and providing water for the march.

The county gave in somewhat once the students announced today's march, though many were unsatisfied with their response. The county agreed to open three extra - and temporary - early voting locations over the weekend, but many students are away from school from Friday through Sunday, making this a less than adequate response on their part.

From a letter written by LCCR to the Department of Justice:

Waller County proposes temporary early polling sites in three locations within the county (Hockley, Pairie View, and Brookshire) for a two-day period, February 22 - 23, 2008. With regard to Prairie View, this two-day period would provide the students at Prairie View A & M University with a diminished opportunity to vote. Rather than conduct voting at the temporary voting site in Prairie View during the week, as has been done in the past, the County has proposed voting there on Friday and Saturday, two days when we have been told by members of the community that the students generally leave campus. The fact that this change was proposed without the input of the minority community in Prairie View combined with the history of voting discrimination within the county, gives the impression that the County is willfully trying to minimize, to the extent possible, the opportunity for the Prairie View students to vote; an action taht would be in line with past attempts to deter students from voting.

Bottom line - the students won some concessions, and today's turnout was impressive, but voter suppression is still happening. The Texas primary is on Tuesday March 4th. Early voting in the state began today.