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In sneakers, Crocs and UGGs, more than a dozen University of Texas at Arlington students walked the half-mile from their dorm, Vandergriff Hall, to the UTA early voting site at the Maverick Activities Center. It was the first day of early voting in Tarrant County, and freshman Finnly More wanted to vote as quickly as possible.

“I have the right to vote, so I will use it. You know, so many people forget that we fought so hard to be able to vote,” said More, who wore a blue UTA T-shirt and planned to put the “I Voted” sticker on it after he won his first Ballots were cast in a presidential election.

Yaseen Tasnif, a former resident at Vandergriff Hall, organized the ballot. The UTA student registered students to vote and informed them about their election issues.

“As college students, as people of color, we have a lot of problems to solve, but because we don't vote often enough, unfortunately we don't see proper representation in politics,” said Tasnif, who is seen as presiding judge at a polling station on Election Day Arlington act.

UTA is one of the largest on-campus early voting sites in Tarrant County, with over 9,700 people who cast early votes for the presidential election there in 2020. Both Republican and Democratic leaders in the county have said every vote counts when it comes to what color the battleground county will get in the presidential election and down-bottom contests. President Joe Biden narrowly won Tarrant in 2020 while Republicans continue to hold all statewide offices.

In a pitched battle this September, UTA and other campus polling locations may have been on the hook. The initiative, led by Republican District Judge Tim O'Hare, would have removed up to four college polling locations from the county's list of early voting locations. O'Hare cited concerns about the accessibility of polling locations on campus and said commissioners should not focus on a particular demographic.

“This doesn’t seem like the right way to conduct an election,” O’Hare said. “This seems like an attempt to favor one group over another. No voter suppression.”

UTA's Maverick Activities Center and early voting sites at Tarrant County College's south and northeast campuses and at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary were among the sites considered for removal. The move sparked outrage among students and university staff across the county.

Ultimately, O'Hare was the only commissioner to support removing college polling places, with two Republicans and two Democrats voting to leave the list unchanged. County GOP leaders rejected the vote after the fact, saying the move hurt the Republican candidates' chances of winning in November.

“It shouldn't be too surprising that O'Hare and the other Republicans on the commission are part of what I believe is a fair Republican national project aimed at increasing Republican turnout and creating barriers to Democratic turnout said Mark Hand, assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Like most college campuses, the UTA student body likely leans left, and therefore high or low turnout on campus could make a difference in some statewide races.”

Trevor McCullough, a freshman political science major and member of the UTA Student Government's Legislative Relations Committee, was one of about a dozen students who spoke up at a commissioners' court meeting in September, addressing elected leaders with shaking hands.

“We knew, No. 1, that it would go against everything we stood for — as student government and as Mavericks — to just let something like that pass and hope for the best,” McCullough said of the student government’s decision to commit express .

McCullough, a political scientist from southwest Fort Worth, was happy to be part of a “sea of ​​people” who spoke on both sides of the issue.

“I'm very interested in the idea of ​​people interacting with government, and I love it. So it was great to be part of that crowd,” McCullough said.

For Emeri Callaway, a law and political science student at TCC Northeast Campus, the polling place controversy gave students the opportunity to see what they are working against and what needs to be done to move forward. Callaway, a member of the Tarrant County Young Democrats, has been campaigning every weekend, participating in phone banks and making sure people begin detailing their plans for how, when and where they will vote.

“I would say we just need to continue what we've been doing, which is reaching out to young Democrats, Democratic leaners and even independents and moderate Republicans because we have a big slate of candidates,” Callaway said. “I want to go blue at all levels of government.”

The report reached out to several young Republican groups in Tarrant County, including campus organizations. None responded to interview requests. At a party to watch the presidential debate in September, Jake Lloyd Colglazier, president of the Fort Worth Young Republicans, told the report he was certain the election would result in former President Donald Trump returning to the White House.

“The Fort Worth Young Republicans are fully behind him and we will do everything we can to get him re-elected,” he said.

James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at TCU, says much of voter mobilization efforts for the nation's youngest voter age group are now virtual.

“We used to have a lot of bumper stickers, a lot of yard signs and a lot of flyers posted around campus. That was very common,” said Riddlesperger, who has taught at the university for more than four decades.

But now, he said, partisan campaigning has become more digital.

“We see it primarily in the form of political ads that show up in people's social media feeds and perhaps emails that end up in their email inboxes,” Riddlesperger said.

Getting TCC students to register to vote is a personal effort. Volunteer assistant registrars at TCC's Northeast Campus in Hurst describe the difference in interest in the upcoming election from last spring to this fall as “night and day.”

“When we left in the spring, a lot of kids said, 'I'm not really interested in voting, or I'm not political,'” said Barbara Leath, a Grapevine retiree and volunteer assistant registrar. She has helped staff the table once a week for four years. “When we came to campus this fall, our first day on campus, we should have had another person to help us because we were so busy.”

Leath has found that young women are very interested in voting. Many students registered themselves and then returned with a friend who also wanted to register. This is a phenomenon Leath had never seen before.

“We usually ask people, ‘Are you registered to vote?’” Leath said. “(This time) we didn’t even ask. (Students) just came up to us and said, 'I have to do this.'”

More and more students are planning to vote before November 5th. And many of them, Leath said, are thinking about bringing their family members to campus so they can vote together.

Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report in association with Open campus. Contact her at [email protected].

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This article first appeared on the Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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