A number of popular Austin polling locations — Perry-Castaneda Library on the UT Austin campus, Zaragosa Recreation Center and Pan Am Recreation Center — have disappeared from the list of Travis County’s early voting sites for the November election.
The Student Government Association at the University of Texas-Austin sent Travis County Commissioners a letter on Oct. 5, asking commissioners to consider adding a polling location on the UT campus closer to undergraduate students. Early voting for the Nov. 8 mid-term election will begin on Monday, Oct. 24.
“There are currently only two polling locations on our campus that houses over 50,000 students, and our duty as Student Government is to advocate for increased and accessible civic engagement avenues–especially during these upcoming midterm elections,” SGA leaders wrote. “We were referred to you by Beto O’Rourke concerning our goal of either adding an additional polling location on UT’s campus or changing the LBJ School location to one that is closer to the majority of students living on/near campus to make voting more accessible.”
Over 400 polling locations in Texas were closed after portions of the Voting Rights Act were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. And, more recently, students at Texas A&M University protested the Brazos County Commissioners’ decision to cut an on-campus polling location for the November 2022 election.
Closure of popular polling locations fall under neither category, County Judge Andy Brown told college students who attended last week’s Commissioners Court meeting. Instead, Travis County agreed to pull a number of popular voting locations — including the Perry-Castaneda Library — after a Department of Justice investigation of polling sites in 2020.
Travis County pulled Perry-Castaneda Library, referred to as PCL, as a polling location in 2020 because of its inability to guarantee social distancing. Instead, students voting at Gregory Gym. Subsequently, DOJ determined PCL — and 55 other existing polling sites — failed to meet the requirement for access under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Because PCL was lost, Travis County’s elections division had to go back to the drawing board, looking at the entire UT campus as a whole, with the intention of locating polling sites at places that were accessible to everyone, easily secured, with the ability to handle parking.
“So, Flawn (Academic Center) and LBJ (School) were the best options,” interim elections administrator Rebecca Guerrero said. “Flawn is a very utilized area. Our concern with voting was adding additional space, that the room itself had several entrances and that we handled any security issues that were a risk to voters.”
The elections division also intends to bump the number of voting machines at each location up to 15 for the November election. Voting locations during the 2020 elections only had nine.
Texas Hillel, on San Antonio Street just off the University of Texas campus, also will be available on election day. It could not be used during early voting because the facility, which serves the university’s Jewish community, would not be accessible on Saturdays.
Early voting in Travis County will be Monday, Oct. 24, to Friday, Nov. 4. Voting locations can be found here, with the four quadrants of the city having at least one mega-center for voting with additional voting machines and extended hours.