MOVE Texas getting new voters onto polls

Every election postmortem in this country includes the obligatory hand-wringing over why young people don’t vote.

Back in 2001, when political observers tried to figure out why only 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds showed up for the ultra-competitive 2000 presidential election, Ryan Friedrichs, then the interim director of a coalition called Youth Vote 2000, came up with an apt diagnosis. Friedrichs called youth voting the victim of a “cycle of neglect.”

This was his point: Young people don’t vote, so candidates ignore their concerns. Then, because candidates ignore those concerns, young people feel even less inclined to vote.

It’s a cycle that H. Drew Galloway, 36, the executive director of MOVE Texas, is devoting his life to breaking. Galloway, a former sommelier who was raised on a Georgia farm, leads a nonpartisan army of civics warriors determined to close the apathy gap in the American political system.

These are heady days for Galloway.

Last year, his organization helped San Antonio triple its municipal-election youth participation (from 3.3 percent to 9.8 percent). This year, MOVE Texas has registered 29,000 new voters.

In the two years since Galloway took over leadership of the nonprofit, it has grown from two employees, two fellows and two in- terns to 14 employees, 23 fellows and 31 interns. Along the way, it expanded its voter outreach beyond San Antonio, prompting a name change earlier this year from MOVE San Antonio.

The past week has been particularly dramatic. As Texas voters went to the polls for the 2018 midterms, MOVE Texas took center stage in a voting-rights faceoff in Hays County.

Hays County commissioners had limited the use of an early voting site on the Texas State University campus to only three days. On Thursday, lawyers for the Texas Civil Rights Project — acting on behalf of MOVE Texas, the League of Women Voters of Hays County and two students — sent a letter to the commissioners, urging them to reopen the polling place. The letter carried the threat of a lawsuit if commissioners didn’t act by the end of the week.

The next day, the commission agreed to reinstate the university polling place for two days of early voting next week as well as Election Day, Nov. 6.

The controversy signaled the surge in voting interest among young Texans during this election cycle, with turnout across the state far exceeding recent midterm levels.

“We are certainly really excited about what’s happening in the field,” Galloway said. “In previous election cycles, we haven’t seen this level of energy. We haven’t seen people talking about politics on college campuses. So I think this has been a buildup in San Antonio over multiple years and cycles worth of work.”

Expanding the electorate is a slow grind, an endless excavation project that demands preternatural persistence.

Galloway’s group makes it a point to turn up at community events, college campuses, high schools, rock and hip-hop concerts and neighborhoods with high concentrations of young people. In March, they set up a table at the Pod Save America show at the Majestic Theatre and registered 40 people in the span of a couple of hours.

Once they’ve exhausted all the possibilities for reaching young voters, they’ll go door-to-door in areas where registration and voting are low.

“Every single voter registration is a conversation,” Galloway said. “It could be a two-minute conversation because the student is in a hurry or we knocked on the door in the middle of dinner or we really have had 20-minute conversations.”

MOVE Texas is effective because it’s rooted in an understanding of how millennials think. As Galloway likes to point out, young people don’t like to be told what to do and they have zero tolerance for inauthenticity. So MOVE Texas bases its model on peer-to-peer dialogue that encourages young people to vote, but doesn’t tell them how to vote.

“We (millennials) do care about voting,” Galloway said. “But the difference, I think, this year is that there’s politicians that are speaking to young-people issues. They’re talking about student-loan debt, they’re talking about health care, they’re talking about affordable housing, they’re talking about public transportation.

“Those are all issues that perk the ears of young people.”

TEC fines

Over the past two years, we’ve reported on Probate Court Judge Kelly Cross’ habit of missing deadlines for filing campaign finance reports.

On Oct. 10, the Texas Ethics Commission imposed a $500 fine on Cross for two late reports, including one that was due eight days before the March 6 Texas primary and that Cross didn’t file until July 5.

The TEC also recently slapped a $500 fine on Tylden Shaeffer, the GOP candidate for Bexar County district attorney. The commission found that Shaeffer was one day late in filing his July 2018 semiannual report and did not provide complete address information for his payees and donors.