In all the talk about barriers to voting—registration issues, voter identification, misinformation and more—it’s easy to overlook another increasingly common obstacle: election officials are getting squeezed out of available spaces to set up the voting equipment on Election Day.
The physical act of voting in the United States for most voters still includes going to a polling place and casting a ballot. Polling places are found in city halls, fire stations, and churches. But one of the most common locations is in public schools.
Public schools are ideal polling places. They tend to exist throughout the community and they are more likely to be accessible to individuals with disabilities. Schools have large rooms that can easily accommodate the needs of a 21st century polling place. They have parking lots, access to electrical power, and can generally accommodate a daily flow of hundreds or thousands of neighbors committed to exercising their civic duty.
That’s why I was pleased to read about the Richardson Independent School District in Texas that recently moved to cancel classes on Election Day in order to remain open to voters. In too many places, the response to Election Day security concerns is to shut out the voting process.
On Election Day 2016, according to the United States Election Assistance Commission, election officials across the country housed more than 175,000 precincts in around 116,000 unique polling places. That’s a lot of sites to find, but more and more election officials report that school districts resist to allowing polling places in schools based on security concerns.
I understand the worry. In today’s world, schools feature many security protocols aimed at keeping children safe. That is one of their primary responsibilities and rightly so. It can be hard for election administrators—many of whom have children attending these neighborhood schools at one time or another—to argue with the safety of children. But in many places, a prohibition on access to schools as polling places will leave election officials with no convenient options for siting polling places.
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which I was honored to informally advise during its work in 2013-2014 and whose recommendations my colleagues and I at the Bipartisan Policy Center continue to develop and advocate for, made a reasonable and rational proposal:
Schools should be used as polling places; to address any related security concerns, Election Day should be an in-service day.
The Commission wrote that “states [should] authorize the use of schools as polling place locations, while at the same time taking all the steps necessary to address these legitimate security concerns. In the end, there is no better alternative than schools, and there are few locations more familiar and convenient to voters. Most communities do not have adequate alternative sites for polling places. Experience in jurisdictions where schools are used as polling places suggests that if schools are made unavailable, there may be either a crisis of access or a removal of polling places from the proximity of voters. It is known that the farther a polling place is moved from a voter the less likely that the voter will turn out to vote.”
Schools as polling places may not be a top of mind concern for those worried about the voting process. However, the local polling place remains the center of the voting process for millions of voters each cycle and policymakers must ensure that the best option remains available.