'Election of Consequence': Texas students push for high voter turnout for primary election

When Vincent Tomasetti was 4 years old, he wanted a cake with President Barack Obama on it for his birthday.

Now a University of Texas sophomore studying civil engineering, his passion for civic engagement has only grown stronger.

“From when I was really young, it was something that I've always been naturally inclined toward,” Tomasetti said. “I like being engaged in a more nonpartisan way because I can take a step back from all the craziness that's around us and be able to just interact with people on a on a deeper scale and get people engaged to form their own beliefs.”

On March 5, Tomasetti will be in Bexar County working at the Texas primary election polls — his sixth time doing so. When he was 17, he became a clerk. He became an elections judge the next year, taking on the responsibility of overseeing the polling station and delivering results to the precinct office.

Tomasetti said he is one of the youngest judges there. “I am definitely the outlier,” he said.

A day before the Feb. 5 voter registration deadline, Tomasetti sat with the student organization TX Votes in the quiet Life Sciences Library in the UT tower, a stack of voter registration forms to his side.

Tomasetti is a trained volunteer deputy registrar, meaning he can register others to vote. In Texas, applications can be completed online but must be received by the registrar’s office in person at least 30 days before an election.

In March, Texas Republican and Democratic voters will pick who they want to nominate for federal, state and local races, including for U.S. president, federal and state House and Senate members, and a slew of other political contests.

Texas voter registration guide: What you need to know to vote in the 2024 primary election

Engaging Texas students to vote

Scott Poole, a UT junior studying government, is the president of TX votes, a nonpartisan organization housed in the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life in the Moody College of Communication that registers, educates and motivates voters by hosting class and student organization presentations, tabling, distributing nonpartisan voter guides and holding events.

At a meeting two days after the semester began, Poole taught 25 students how to catch an invalid ballot before they completed online volunteer deputy registrar training from the county.

During the 2020 election, 90% of UT students were registered to vote, and 75% voted, a Tufts University report found. The LBJ School of Public Affairs, Texas Hillel Foundation and the UT Flawn Academic Center are primary voting locations near campus.

“We want to keep up a record-breaking turnout,” Poole said.

Texas’ youth voter turnout hit 21.5% in 2022, down 4.3 percentage points from 2018, a Tufts study found. In the fall, the student TX Votes group registered more than 1,000 voters, Tomasetti said, but the spring tends to be slower.

Sena Oguzman, a UT freshman studying rhetoric and writing, said she joined TX Votes to engage students from a nonpartisan perspective.

“Even though Gen Z, we're very much informed about politics and we're trying to create change, which is great, I still think we need to increase our information around voting and elections,” she said.

Which political races are Texas students are watching?

Jackson Paul, a UT senior and co-chair of Young Conservatives of Texas at UT, a nonpartisan conservative organization, said the group helps connect people with resources to understand who is running in their district and how to register to vote.

The conservative student group posts a legislative scorecard rating Texas lawmakers on how they voted in the last legislative session. Paul said the issues that are important in this race are border security and school choice.

He also said he thinks dissatisfaction with the Biden administration is driving students to think differently.

“This upcoming election is going to show that there have been seismic shifts philosophically and therefore politically among young people,” he said.

University Democrats President Matthew McCoy, a UT senior, said the organization endorses local candidates, door-knocks for candidates off-campus, distributes election resources to West Campus apartments, registers people to vote and has tables outside a UT voting site.

“It is a primary, it's in the spring and less people are paying attention, but we’re out here pushing,” McCoy said. "Especially here in Austin, the primaries are the election of consequence.”

The organization recently endorsed Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Roland Gutierrez, a state senator from San Antonio, to run against Ted Cruz — which McCoy said is “by far” the most important race in Texas. U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, is leading Gutierrez for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, according to a recent poll by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs.

McCoy said the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the border are the primary concerns for University Democrats.

Related: How Texas' two leading Democrats for US Senate nomination differ on bipartisan border bill

' I just want to give back to the community'

Freeman Crawford, a Huston-Tillotson University sophomore, is the co-president of Public Leadership, a group striving to secure more funding and equity for Texas historically Black colleges and universities.

Huston-Tillotson hosts an early voting location, and Public Leadership is encouraging people to vote for candidates that support HBCUs. Students and state lawmakers launched an HBCU Legislative Caucus last May to obtain more funding for HBCUs, and Crawford hopes this next election will help the cause.

“It's important to us because if we don't have the right people to support it, that how are we ever going to get a change in our HBCUs?” Crawford said.

St. Edward’s students pushed earlier this year for an early voting location, but administrators declined because the university could not find a space that could be used for the time needed, the Travis County clerk's office told the American-Statesman. (St. Edward's did not return Statesman requests for comment for that story.)

Cindy Cuellar, who co-leads the university's chapter of Texas Rising, a project of the nonpartisan Texas Freedom Network that advocates for social justice in Texas, will continue to push for an early voting location at St. Edward's for the November general election.

"Early voting at such a young age, from 18 to your 20s, it shows that it typically creates a pattern for voting almost in every election and (creating) patterns for people to vote as lifelong voters," she said.

Cuellar said voter education and engagement are important to her because she didn't know how to exercise her right to vote until she reached college.

"I'm a first-generation student, and I just want to give back to the community," Cuellar said. "As we all know, sometimes our government doesn't really reflect what Texas looks like — the diversity."

Off to the races

Early voting in the Texas primaries begins Tuesday and runs through March 1. Election day is March 5.

TX Votes, the UT student group, is gearing up to educate people on the election before March 5. And Tomasetti will drive to Bexar County to open and close the polls on election day — an often 14-hour day for him. Outside of college, he said he'd like to continue being an election judge.

“I help the process of democracy, albeit in a very small way,” he said. “Being engaged civically is something that's just bigger than yourself at times.”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas students push for high youth voter turnout for primary elections