How Texas High Schools are Registering their Students to Vote
by Rebecca Alexander
Texas takes the cake for having one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country, which is not something we should be proud of. The government is aware of this, and in an attempt to help change this, in 1983, the Texas Legislature added a section to the Texas election code which states that each principal of a public or private high school or the principal’s designee shall serve as a deputy registrar.[1] Essentially every principal of a high school in Texas is required to help any student who is eligible to vote to get registered. The principals are allowed to designate another school employee. Regardless of this rule, very few schools register their students to vote, often times it is because they are not aware of this rule[2]. The question this report seeks to analyze is whether the demographics of a school have any impact on voter registration.
Despite this law, only 14% of of public high schools in Texas requested voter registration forms and no private schools requested them. In a report by the Texas Civil Rights Project, only 198 of the 1,428 public schools in the state of Texas requested the forms[3]. In 2012, Texas had the third-lowest youth voting rate in the country, despite having a law requiring high schools to register eligible students[4].
The League of Women Voters of Texas is doing research to gauge how many schools are registering their students. We emailed a survey to over 1,000 public high schools in Texas. The goal of this research is to get a better understanding of all the different ways schools are engaging students and registering them to vote. With this information, I will compare if majority minority schools are doing things differently than majority white schools. Currently, only 51 schools have responded, which makes it extremely difficult to see any type of pattern. With the data I have received so far, there is not enough to see if there is or is not a clear difference in the way majority minority schools and majority white schools go about registration. The survey asks the schools if they register their eligible students, if they have a High School Deputy Registrar (HSDR), if yes, who it is, where they get their registration forms, and where they offer registration opportunities. I have split the answers into majority minority and majority white groups to compare.
In addition to hoping to get an accurate representation of how many Texas public high schools are actually following the law, I hope to see whether a school being majority minority or non-majority minority makes a difference. Majority minority schools are categorized as any school with a make-up of less than 49% white students and non-majority minority schools are categorized as any school having 51% or more white students. This information was gathered from the Texas Education Agency (TEA). As seen in Table 1, from the responses received so far, it seems that most non-majority minority schools offer voter registration just twice a year. While majority minority schools are just as likely to offer voter registration more than twice a year as only twice, as a whole they offer voter registration more than twice a year more than non-majority minority schools do.
The most I can tell from the results shown in Table 2 is that majority minority schools use a HSDP more. HSDP at majority minority schools are most often principal’s according to Table 3.
The data in Table 4 currently shows that most majority minority schools get voter registration forms from the County Voter Registrar’s office and most non majority minority schools get the forms from the Secretary of State’s office.
With the data I have so far, it is difficult to tell if these trends will continue. The data discussed above and shown in the tables makes it seem like majority minority schools are more engaged or proactive in registering their students, but that is simply because at this point in time they have given the most responses.
As more responses come in, I will be interested to see if there is a pattern. If not, that means that a school being majority minority or non-majority minority makes no difference. So far, this is what my small amount of data is showing. I also find it interesting that only 14% of high schools supposedly register their students, while out of my 51 responses, only one has said they do not register.
[1] Texas Election Code http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/EL/htm/EL.13.htm
[2] The Texas Civil Rights Project. Texas High School Voter Registration: A How to Guide. https://actionnetwork.org/user_files/user_files/000/017/952/original/HSVR-Guide.pdf
[3]Report: Most Texas high schools aren’t registering students to vote https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local/report-most-texas-high-schools-aren-registering-students-vote/WXJ4Q4xeLdtg9GvaAQAklK/
[4]Young-Adult Voting: An Analysis of Presidential Elections, 1964–2012 https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-573.pdf