COLLEGE STATION, Texas – Tuesday was the last day to register to vote in Texas, and college students are already thinking about how or where they’ll cast a ballot.
Kristina Samuel is the founder and president of MOVE Texas TAMU. The senior has been passionate about civics since she voted for the first time in 2020. But this year, casting a ballot will look different on campus.
Weeks ago, the Brazos County Commissioners Court voted to move A&M’s early voting site from the Memorial Student Center (MSC) to an off-campus location at College Station City Hall. Students raised concerns, but the commissioners said it was too late to bring it back.
“I think regardless of whether they meant to or not, it is voter suppression,” Samuel said. “Just by definition, it makes voting more difficult.”
Since there’s no early voting on campus, she thinks it’ll be less convenient for students to cast a ballot.
“Early voting is just great for college students because it allows students to have literally two weeks to go between classes, and the lines are usually much shorter,” Samuel said. “And it makes voting as accessible as it should be, in my opinion.”
The one person who voted against the move was Republican Commissioner Russ Ford. He never thought it was a good idea.
“I was the one lone dissenting opinion that realized that if we move that from the MSC, that it could very possibly disenfranchise a whole bunch of young voters,” Ford said. “It turns out that the MSC has the availability of voting about 130,000 people there. You got 70,000 students, you got faculty, you got staff, you got other people that work nearby the university or they're contractors in the university. And it's the most central polling location, early voting location, that we could possibly have in Brazos County.”
Ford, who called himself a “card-carrying Republican,” said moving the early voting site off-campus will cost them just as many conservative voters as it will liberal voters.
"I don't think they're helping themselves at all by losing those votes," Ford said.
Samuel and other students have been showing up to Commissioners Court on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for weeks now to speak with their elected officials about their concerns.
“Those students have been very professional, very organized. And I hope if nothing else comes from this, they understand that becoming involved and coming and being heard has made a difference,” Ford said. “In other words, you had a bunch of career politicians there that didn't care. And now after those people came and spoke, who spoke time and time again, they're listening. That's exactly what it takes in government: The people that make the decisions are the people that show up. So these students, if they learned nothing else, I hope that they come back.”
Samuel and other students are raising money to provide buses to City Hall so Aggies can cast a ballot during the early voting period. In Commissioners Court on Tuesday, A&M student Ishika Shah said it’d cost more than $15,300 to do this. The commissioners voted to contribute $5,000, a third of what they need. Ford said they might raise that dollar amount.
“It's still going to disenfranchise because they don't have time between classes to catch a bus, go to College Station City Hall, stand in line and then catch a bus back and try to make their classes,” Ford said.
Brazos County Judge Duane Peters stands by the Court's decision. College Station City Hall is a little less than two miles away from the MSC.
“Certainly, there's no voter suppression,” Peters said. “We've tried to make it as easy as we could for everybody, and it's really not that great a distance.”
Peters believes the City Hall location will be popular among all College Station residents, including students.
“If the students want to vote, we want them to vote; we encourage them to come vote,” Peters said. “So we'll try to make it as easy as we can to get them to the voting location.”
While Texas A&M doesn’t have an early voting site this year, other Texas universities do. The University of Texas at Austin has two. The University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas State University, the University of Houston and Texas Tech University each have one.
Aggies will be able to vote at the MSC and the College of Medicine on Election Day.