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Jordan Jones plans to cast a vote for the first time this fall. And for the 20-year-old student at Texas Southern University, a historically black school in Houston's Third Ward, voting in the November general election is much easier than in the March primary.

Texas Southern, which first became a polling location when Harris County set up statewide voting centers in 2019, did not serve as an early voting location in the primary. However, this applies to the presidential election on November 5th, with early voting starting on October 21st.

“It’s very important,” Jones said. “Our voice is really important. There are many of us. We want to have a say. If you want to have a say, you have to stand up and vote.”

The nearby University of Houston, where the number of students, staff and faculty exceeds 50,000, also regained its early voting site for the upcoming election after not conducting early voting in March. Losing out on early voting was a “disappointment,” according to UH Vice Chancellor Jason Smith, who said he lobbied the Harris County Clerk's Office to have it reinstated with the help of some local elected officials.

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“It’s super important to have this location,” said Diego Arriaga, UH student body president. “It promotes student voting, community voting and voting accessibility. If it wasn’t on campus, I wouldn’t imagine many of our students would bother to find a place off campus to vote.”

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A total of 12 colleges and universities in Harris County will conduct early voting this fall. This could be seen as a win for students' access to voting at a time when some Texas lawmakers want to eliminate or limit on-campus voting.

Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Hill Country Republican, proposed a state law last year that would have eliminated voting at colleges in Texas, citing security concerns related to mass shootings. And earlier this month, a Republican district judge in Fort Worth made a failed attempt to eliminate voting at some colleges there. The district's GOP leaders later said that would have improved their chances of winning in November, according to the Texas Tribune.

“There are definitely people in the state who want to suppress the vote and view the vote in a partisan way,” said Alex Birnel, the advocacy director of MOVE Texas, a nonprofit focused in part on voting rights. “Student polling stations in particular are under threat.”

There is a history of voter suppression at Prairie View A&M, a historically black university northwest of Houston in Waller County. In August, students there were on the verge of having their votes diluted when county officials considered a request from local members of the Patriot Party to set up two early voting sites in predominantly white, conservative areas.

The county backed away from the idea because elections director Christy Eason said expanding elections early at this point would have been too costly, too logistically difficult and ultimately unfair. The proposal also sparked opposition from a group of black Democrats.

“We wanted parity,” said Dr. Denise Mattox, chairwoman of the Waller County Democratic Party. “If they wanted two locations for early voting centers, then we wanted two.”

Harris County County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, a black Democrat who graduated from Texas Southern, said that under her administration “no one is suppressing anyone’s voice.” She also said there has “never been a time when UH and TSU were not considered as polling locations.”

Hudspeth did not specify why there was no early voting at Houston universities during the primaries. She said polling locations could change depending on the type of election, the county's resources and workforce, the availability of sites and past voter turnout.

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UH's Arriaga and Smith both said relatively low voter turnout in previous elections may have been a factor. Among the 68 early voting locations for the November 2023 election, there were 41 locations that had more early voters than Texas Southern's 2,145 locations. UH attracted fewer early voters this election, 1,545, but that was more than 17 other locations.

Smith said he will encourage both UH students and staff to make better use of the early voting site this fall. The same is true at neighboring Texas Southern, where student Ayanna Wilmore and her sorority held voter registration events ahead of the Oct. 7 deadline.

“The fact that people in Houston can vote on campus is definitely a win,” Wilmore said. “We just have to make sure it stays a win. We just need to make sure we do our part to use that polling place to make sure there’s no reason to take it away from us.”