Tag Archives: Voter Registration in Texas

Missing Out: Texas High Schools Way Behind On Voter Registration Mandate

Ask any teacher or principal at a Texas High School, and they can immediately tell you that in their job, they have a lot to do.  Teaching course curriculum, supervising their classrooms, meeting benchmarks, planning for the safety of their schools.  It’s a lot to contend with in most any machination.

Given that this is the case, it’s probably not a surprise that most Texas High School Administrators are paying less attention to the state laws around voting than they are the state graduation requirements.  As Ashley Lopez of KUT Austin reports, this seems to be the case for an overwhelming majority of our state’s high schools.

Roughly a third of Texas high schools have requested voter registration forms from the Texas Secretary of State’s office, a new report from the Texas Civil Rights Project finds.

Requesting forms from the state agency is the first step schools must take so they can register students to vote. Texas law requires schools to give eligible students these forms at least twice each school year.

While the percentage of schools following the law is low at 34 percent, it’s higher than what it was in 2016 – a mere 14 percent.

Researchers looked at requests for voter registration forms by high schools “from the close of voter registration for the last presidential election (October 2016) to the close of voter registration for this year’s first round primaries (February 2018).”

With 66 percent of Texas High Schools not requesting a single Voter Registration form for eligible students, the news can seem pretty bleak.  But a couple of factors can affect this particular law.  For one thing, the Texas Civil Rights Project report strongly suspects that most high schools don’t even know this law exists, as it has not been enforced in recent memory.  Because the state never talks about this law, there’s a good chance many principals do not know about it.  So putting the knowledge out there will help to recruit some school administrators that may not have previously known to comply.

But as disheartening as the news maybe, it also presents a rare opportunity.  With more than sixty days to go before the 2018 General Election Voter Registration Deadline (October 9th), parents, students, and concerned community members have the ability to inquire about these practices at their local schools.  With some careful planning and hard work, there is still time to get many more interested students access to Voter Registration Forms.

If you’re an administrator reading this post, here is the direct link to the form needed to request official Voter Registration Forms be sent to your High School.  Though we all hope the day when the Texas Secretary of State will simply send the forms to our schools and HELP our students to exercise their rights as citizens, we can still make an impact right now.

Most voting age citizens of Texas also have the ability to become Volunteer Deputy Voter Registrars, which is a great way to encourage voter registration in your community.  Many groups even organize workshops to help citizens through the process, but here are the steps to become a VDVR directly from the Texas Secretary of State website.

Lone Star Rising: Voter Registration Soars Across Texas

“Texas isn’t a Red State.  It’s a non-voting state.”

When most people hear this, they tend to laugh out loud.  Much of contemporary American politics hinges on the stalwart truth that Texas is and will always be a Red State.  The national Democratic Party, including President Obama, haven’t spent a lot of time in Texas because of this “truth”… they view the state mostly as a fundraising tool for more competitive races in other states.  Even with strong candidates like Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte, the majority of the country has written off the quiet, but persistent work of groups like Battleground Texas.  After all, who cares how many Tweets you post saying you are doing something?  It’s not real until official numbers start to come in.

Well this week, the Lone Star State got its first indicator of whether the coordinated efforts of BGTX, Texas Democrats and other groups have made any sort of difference. It is not unfair to say that many around the country may be in for a shock.  Here’s what’s going on, starting with the Houston Chronicle

The number of Texans registered to vote in the state’s five largest counties increased by 2 percent since 2012, a reversal of the decline in total voter registrations that was seen before the last midterm election.

Nearly 150,000 more Texans in these counties are eligible to vote in November’s election between Greg Abbott and Wendy Davis than could vote in the 2012 presidential election, according to tallies released by Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis counties midday Monday, the last day to register.

[…]

Voter registration groups hailed the uptick in registration before a midterm election, which traditionally sees much lower turnout than during presidential years, as evidence that their efforts to register low-propensity voters had paid off. Five percent of those voting in Harris County are new registrants.

The Chronicle is comparing totals from the last presidential year, but a much clearer comparison to 2014 would be the non-presidential election year of 2010.  This was done by venerable blog Off the Kuff, who added in El Paso County and aggregated the numbers.  He found that the 6 largest counties in Texas now account for a whopping 373,000 more voters registered when compared to 2010 (the last non-presidential election year).  Kudos to blog author Charles Kuffner on this, whose research just became national news.

Kuff’s numbers aren’t even the end of the story, as one quick virtual trip to the Rio Grande Valley will reveal.  Here’s more from Zachary Roth of msnbc.com on that…

It’s not just the state’s most populated counties that have seen registration increases, either. Hidalgo and Cameron counties in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas saw increases since 2012 of 15,000 and 6,000 respectively, according to a local news report. The area has long had low rates of political participation, but was a focus of Battleground Texas’s campaign. According to Sackin, officials with both counties told Battleground volunteers that the group had registered more new voters than any previous effort they’d seen.

And the number of registered voters in the six counties that make up southeast Texas increased from 2012 by 8,000, the Beaumont Enterprise reported.

[…]

“If Latinos and Hispanics in Texas came out to vote, we’d be talking about a completely different electorate in Texas,” Daniel Lucio, Battleground Texas’s deputy field director, told msnbc earlier this year.

If you’re noticing a pattern with these counties, then you might be familiar with this blog’s Operation Think Swing Texas post, which lines out the counties that Democrats have to focus on if they want to win this year’s and any future elections in Texas.  So here’s some research on one more of those critical counties:  Fort Bend.  Here are their numbers from previous elections, including the 2014 number obtained as of October 1st (there were so many registration forms, they are still counting)…

2010 Registered Voters: 308,985

2012 Registered Voters:  341,523

2014 Registered Voters:  362,711

Even Lubbock County, home of Texas Tech and the panhandle city of Lubbock, has seen a substantial boost from 2010 to 2014…

2010 Registered Voters: 150,291

2012 Registered Voters:  156,140

2014 Registered Voters: 157,275

That’s 22,323 more registrants than in 2012, and 60,710 more than the last gubernatorial election in 2010, with more to go.  Add Fort Bend and Lubbock to Kuff’s total without the actual numbers from the RGV, and you’re up to 433,000 more voters on the books in Texas than in 2010.  The numbers in Texas’ largest counties are now surpassing 2008 registration levels, setting the stage for possibly historic turnout in the Lone Star State.

Those living on the front lines of Texas politics can definitely tell you that something special is going on right now.  We have to be careful of making too many assumptions before the votes are actually cast.  But one thing is for sure from these totals… the first goal of groups like Battleground Texas and state Democrats has been met:  register more voters.   Now that all of these citizens are on the books, they at least have the option of making their voices heard this election day.

Let’s see just how loud Texas’ “silent majority” can get in 2014.

 

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