Please don’t discourage voting!

I am alarmed to learn that the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee is conducting a hearing May 29 to consider eliminating county-wide vote centers. What is the reason? It seems to me that providing individual precinct vote sites would cost more than county-wide centers and more difficult for voters who don’t readily know their precinct number.

Providing countywide centers allows workers to vote during lunch hour at the nearest site and eliminates many problems. For example, in an election prior to vote centers, the Texas State University Campus was split into two different precincts. There was a vote center on campus where students reasonably thought they could vote but some discovered at the last minute they could not and did not have transportation to their assigned precinct.

Whereas many states have policies to encourage voters such as same-day registration, automatic registration, or online registration, Texas does not. Any law in our United States democracy should encourage voting, not discourage it!

Betsy Singleton San Marcos