PVAMU voting trial begins
Students allege suppression tactics
A Prairie View A&M University alumna and a professor took the virtual stand Monday in the first day of a weeklong trial with students and alumni saying that Waller County officials allegedly obstructed their rights to vote.
U.S. Southern Texas District Judge Charles Eskridge held the trial over Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prairie View A&M students and alumni, including Jayla Jenice Allen, Damon Johnson and Treasure Smith, sued the county in 2018 over claimed violations of their civil rights. They allege the county offered easily-accessible locations to “non-Black and non-student voters,” rather than to the more than 8,250 students — 80 percent of whom were Black — who attended the historically black college, according to the federal lawsuit.
Leah Aden, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., called the case “the latest iteration in Waller County’s long persistent of continuing record of suppressing the political power of Black voters.”
Aden emphasized that the denial of additional early voting hours was a discriminatory practice based on students’ age and/or race. “College students across the country have the right to vote where they go to school, yet Waller County continues to be nationally
known, stratagem and stratagem, to limit Black students’ voting rights,” Aden said.
Allen, who graduated from PVAMU in December 2019, testified that students decided to push back after learning that early voting at the campus’ Memorial Student Center that year had been reduced to two 12- hour days rather than the two weeks they had expected. After some dispute, additional hours were added at Prairie View City Hall, which is more than a mile away. But Allen, 21, said the situation was still alarming
Meanwhile, PVAMU’s student center serves as a convenient and central hub on campus, with several amenities, including the campus mail room, auditorium, book store, dining hall and offices for financial aid and registrar, according to Allen.
“It was brought to our notice because in the past we had been given two weeks of earlyvoting.… We were given the same amount of time in the first and second week to vote,” said Allen, noting that more options for early voting and having the mon campus were convenient for students with busy schedules and those with little access to transportation. Voting results published by Waller County for the March 2018 primary also indicate that 64 percent of PVAMU students voted early, compared to 43 percent countywide, court documents state.
Allen, who served as a precinct chair of PVAMU’s polling station and helped organize voting efforts on campus, said in re--
sponse, she and other students hosted a “Pull Up to the Polls” carpooling. event, where they volunteered and drove students to the Waller County Courthouse to vote, nearly 15 minutes away.
Defense attorney Gunnar Seaquist pushed back, saying Waller County has consistently provided early voting near the campus since 2002, that the county community center is located “within the footprint” of the campus, and that county officials had built additional sidewalks to connect the campus to the community center.
Seaquist also challenged Allen’s assertion of what was convenient, questioning how far students would walk to parties held in fields near campus or how far Allen would travel in her car for groceries.
Seaquist said it was true that PVAMU had fewer early voting hours than certain towns and cities in Waller County, but said that fewer “hours do not equate to unequal opportunity.”
Peniel E. Joseph, a professor of public affairs and history at Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin who was brought on to testify as an expert, argued that there has been entrenched racism involved in the voting process in Texas since Black people were given the right to vote and a “steady and unmistakable pattern of Waller County trying to suppress the vote of PVAMU students.”
In 1992, Black student voters from PVAMU were indicted for alleged voter fraud or illegally voting out of their jurisdiction. Charges were dropped later that year. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an objection letter to Waller County officials, who had proposed a redistricting plan that seemed to undermine the effectiveness of racial minority voters.
In 2016, students protested to have an early voting location at PVAMU’s student center, and in many ways, the fight still continues, Joseph said. “These are quieter, but still lethal voting tactics.”
The trial is scheduled to continue this week.