Texas State Representative Carrie Isaac wants to keep democracy out of Texas schools.
Isaacs, a freshman Republican, last week filed a 124-word bill to bar polling places at any “institution of higher education,” and on Tuesday he said he would bar polling places at K-12 public and charter schools. Working on a bill to ban it. , Very.
“We must do everything we can to make our school campuses as safe as possible,” he said in a release, referring to a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde last year and a fatal knife attack at a university in 2017. “I have experienced firsthand the emotions that often occur at polling places and I will not wait for more violence to act.”
Neither incident had anything to do with voting.
Democrats have advocated legislation in the current legislative session to mandate polling places on large college campuses.
Move Texas, a group that mobilizes youth voters, condemned The bill in a statement as “one of the most insidious attempts to silence young voters”.
Universities and schools are common polling places because they are large enough to accommodate large numbers of voters and are well-known in the community, said James Slattery, senior supervising legislative attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, which advocates for voting rights and criminal justice reform.
“It is absurd for me to say that democracy and voting are more dangerous to young people than the fact that the state is littered with guns everywhere,” he said.
While election rules and voting have been top goals for Texas Republicans in the past, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — who controls the agenda for the first two months of the legislative session — has urged legislators to focus on bills related to issues including school safety. called upon. Boundary and property tax.
