Texas Republican seeks ban on polling locations at colleges

Texas state Rep. Carrie Isaac needs to maintain democracy out of Texas colleges.

Isaac, a freshman Republican, filed a 124-word invoice to bar polling locations at any “establishment of upper schooling” final week, and on Tuesday, she mentioned she’s engaged on a invoice to bar polling locations at Ok-12 public and constitution colleges, too.

“We should do every little thing we are able to to make our faculty campuses as protected as doable,” she mentioned in a launch, mentioning the capturing at an elementary faculty in Uvalde final yr and a lethal knife assault at a college in 2017. “I’ve skilled firsthand the heightened feelings that always happen at polling areas and I cannot watch for extra violence to behave.”

Neither incident had something to do with voting.

Democrats have advocated for laws to mandate polling websites on bigger school campuses within the present legislative session.

MOVE Texas, a gaggle that mobilizes younger voters, condemned the invoice in a press release as “some of the insidious makes an attempt to silence younger voters.”

Universities and colleges are frequent polling locations as a result of they’re large enough to accommodate giant numbers of voters and are well-known in the neighborhood, mentioned James Slattery, the senior supervising legislative lawyer on the Texas Civil Rights Mission, which advocates for voting rights and legal justice reform.

“It’s ludicrous to me to say that democracy and voting is in some way extra harmful to younger folks than the truth that the state is awash in weapons all over the place,” he added.

Whereas elections guidelines and voting have been prime targets for Texas Republicans up to now, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — who controls the agenda for the primary two months of the legislative session — known as on legislators to give attention to payments regarding points together with faculty security, the border and property taxes.