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. . . Florence’s one day of early voting was a casualty of a newly implemented Texas election law that lawmakers said they pushed to curb abuse in school bond elections. But the law was crafted broadly enough to upend a long-established practice of moving polling places during the early voting period to reach as many voters as possible near where they live, work or go to school. With a Nov. 5 constitutional election looming, the new law has left a trail of shuttered early voting polling places across the state, prompting unease among election officials about how far it'll go in limiting access to early voting in next year’s high-stakes election.
In Williamson County alone, the impact of the new law — one championed by Republican lawmakers — has reached the rural stretch of the Central Texas county and Southwestern University in Georgetown.
Campus officials used their turn at a one-day temporary polling place in 2018 to help turn out more than half of the university's nearly 1,500 students, according to Emily Sydnor, an assistant professor of political science who has spent her four years at Southwestern looking for ways to engage students in the electoral process.
She knows well the difference proximity can make, and she rattles of the numbers easily: There’s a 66% likelihood that someone will vote if their polling place is a hundredth of a mile away. The likelihood that someone without a car will vote drops to 42% if they have to walk two-thirds of a mile.
. . . This year’s wave of closures started with an effort to curb what critics call “rolling polling,” in which entities running elections may frequently rotate early voting sites to target specific voters.
For years, election officials across the state used temporary polling places to offer a day or two of early voting in places where it wasn’t practical or cost-efficient to maintain a site open for all of the early voting period. Some counties used the practice to reach smaller communities or to spend time at various college campuses within a county; others used mobile voting sites to bring a day of early voting to hospitals, government buildings that can’t host a permanent site, and senior living facilities where residents face mobility issues.
But that flexibility resulted in the “selective harvesting of targeted voters,” particularly in school bond elections where voting sites were set up in school facilities, state Rep. Greg Bonnen argued during this year’s legislative session. The Friendswood Republican offered House Bill 1888 as a solution that would do away with temporary voting sites by requiring polling places to remain open for all 12 days of early voting.
“The flexibility of polling locations was designed to accommodate more voters near their homes or workplaces, but some subdivisions of the state have abused this flexibility and targeted desirable voting populations at the exclusion of others,” Bonnen told the House Elections Committee as it considered his legislation in March.
Asked about the effect the bill would have on early voting, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office told the committee it would “limit substantially” the use of temporary voting sites that were being used for legitimate purposes.
