Prairie View students sue over early vote
Waller County cut days in violation of rights, they contend
Amid the record-breaking surge of early voting in Texas, five Prairie View A&M students have lodged a lawsuit contending Waller County has suppressed their ability to do the same at the historically black campus.
The students accused the county of violating their civil rights by offering easily-accessible locations to “non-Black and non-student voters,” rather than the more than 8,250 students — 80 percent of whom are black — who call the education hub home, according to the federal lawsuit.
The case was filed Monday in Houston, where more than 181,000 voters in Harris County set a new record for the first two days of early voting in a midterm election.
There were no early voting sites in Prairie View for the first week, the federal suit states. Next week, however, Waller County is expected to give Prairie View residents five days to vote at the oncampus Memorial Student Center and WC Community Center a mile off campus.
The suit takes exception to the lack of weekend and evening hours and the location for the offcampus community center on FM 1098, which the students argue is not easily accessible to young voters who lack transportation.
The student center is slated to be open next Monday through Wednesday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., while the community center will be open Thursday through Friday from 7 a.m to 7 p.m., according to a list of early voting locations on the Waller County website.
The first week offered early voting hours — including weekend opportunities — in Hempstead, Waller and Brookshire.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed the suit on behalf of the five students, identified in court documents as Jayla Allen, Damon Johnson, Joshua Muhammad, Raul Sanchez and Treasure Smith.
Among the defendants in the case are members of the Waller County Commissioners Court, who heard testimony from multiple Prairie View A&M students during an Oct. 17 meeting asking for better early voting locations and hours.
In response to the early voting plan, one of the plaintiffs, Muhammad, testified that the school “keeps getting the short end of the stick” when it comes to polling locations.
A member of the Prairie View City Council who attends the university argued that the community center polling site — near where a post office is also located — is a less than ideal location because students send and receive their mail on campus, according to the court document. The council member was not identified in the lawsuit.
During the meeting, the Commissioners Court said the polling sites were compiled with input from the local Republican and Democratic parties and that the university was left off the first week of early voting because the commissioners believed it “would conflict with PVAMU’s homecoming,” the complaint states.
Judge Carbett “Trey” Duhon III and Waller County Elections Administrator Christy Eason, both of whom are defendants in the case, spoke favorably of tweaking the early voting plan, but the Commissioners Court ultimately voted 3-2 to dismiss the proposal.
The lawsuit requests that the days and hours at the Memorial Student Center be changed from either Oct. 25 through Nov. 2 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or include the same hours on Oct. 25 and 26. Additionally, the students request that the center be open Saturday, Oct. 27, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and the following day on Sunday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. to accommodate students on the weekend.
After filing the lawsuit, Leah Aden, the deputy director of litigation for the NAACP fund, called the voting plan another example of the county’s decades-old history of voter suppression.
“Since at least the early 1970s, Waller County has consistently tried to limit the political power of black voters in the city of Prairie View and at Prairie View A&M specifically by undermining their right to vote,” Aden said in a statement.
A voter registration mix-up that was discovered more than a week before early voting started, election officials in Waller County clarified that all Prairie View A&M students would have to fill out a statement of residence form when casting their ballots in November. It was discovered that thousands of students may have been registered to vote under the wrong address.
The form applied to those who live on campus and were registered to vote at the Memorial Student Center precinct.
The Associated Press reported that Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Tuesday.