A Step Forward (Hopefully) for Waller County, Texas

by: KatRose

Fri Oct 24, 2008 at 15:24:42 PM EDT

From the Houston Chronk:

For the next four years, Waller County officials must justify all rejected voter registrations to the U.S. Justice Department and report every voter application received during registration drives at Prairie View A&M University, a three-judge panel has ruled.

The order also means that the county must submit twice-yearly reports about its voter registration process.

Waller County has been criticized for thwarting registration efforts by students at PVAMU, a historically black college, and has faced numerous lawsuits over the last 30 years related to student voting rights.

Other than Prairie View A&M, Waller County actually has only two reasons for continuing to exist: speed traps in and around the county seat of Hempstead, and a giant car dealership in Hempstead whose chief spokes-oid is former Houston Oiler (and Texas A&M - not to be confused with PV A&M) football star Greg Childress.  (Full disclosure:  I went to Texas A&M as an undergrad - before the US 290 bypass was built around Hempstead - and I never got victimized by the speed traps there, but I knew many people who did whilst going back-and-forth between College Station and Houston.)

The largely white non-Prairie View populace of Waller County has never been too thrilled with th prospect of the non-whites at the college being able to have a say in things.  For a while, if I recall correctly, it was the only one of Texas' 254 counties that would not afford college students the option of voting as residents of the county based on their resident attendance at a college in the county.

True, not all 254 counties have a college - but you get the idea. 

The suit against the county and Waller County Registrar Ellen C. Shelburne was settled with a consent decree.

In the court-approved agreement, Waller County officials acknowledged rejecting voter registration applications — mostly from PVAMU students — through new practices instituted in 2007 without permission from federal authorities.

Prairie View is a relatively small school, but in a non-heavily-populated county the difference between having the students vote and not having the students vote is...

well, you get the idea.

Hopefully, those who are enforcing voting rights who appear to have gotten the idea actually intend to make sure that procedures don't revert.