“A Texas lawmaker explains why she wants to ban polling places from college campuses”

KERA:

Why gave you the idea for your bill (H.B. 2390)?

In Texas, we have one of the longest early voting periods of any state in the nation: Two weeks of early voting.

I don’t believe it’s wise to be inviting people onto our campuses that would not otherwise have any business on our campuses. I think it opens up an avenue for nefarious actors.

And, you know, people ask me, will something happen? Well, yes. I mean, poll workers that have been threatened. At a lot of the polling locations, the emotions run high. I’ve seen fights over different reasons, different fights over where they’re going to stand, fights over signage. And I’ve been yelled at, flipped off. It just seems like emotions run really high during campaign season.

But college campuses are typically open to anyone to come and go, and far more often than that without incident. So how would, barring a polling place, change that?

I’m a mom of a high school senior in public school. The other one is on a college campus. And I worry about my boys probably more now that they’re older than I did when they were nine in their safety.

When instances happen, the first thing a law enforcement person is going to say is look for someone who doesn’t belong. Look for someone who would normally be there. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re just inviting those people that would not normally be on our campus onto our campuses.

If security is your concern, why not instead focus on trying to make college polling places more secure?

Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard lately, but a lot of people have defunded the police and they’re hurting right now for law enforcement. So, we’re going to make all of these campuses have police officers all day, every day for two weeks?

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