During my time as the Empirical Scholarship Editor for the Yale Law Journal (YLJ), I got to work with a number of talented authors and amazing student editors. Every once in a blue moon I was able to collaborate with an author and make maps to accompany their piece. One of those instances was for a Volume 129 Forum piece by Joaquin Gonzalez, titled Fighting Back to Protect Student Voting Rights.

Gonzalez spent a year at the Texas Civil Rights Project on a YLJ-sponsored public interest fellowship, during which he worked on election and voting-rights issues. During that time, he observed how student voters “face a wide variety of obstacles that can deter them from democratic participation.” For example, many jurisdictions do not accept student identification as ID for voting purposes. In other jurisdictions, voting locations on or near colleges and universities are sparse. Gonzalez writes that, “[t]his lack of access can be the direct result of actions by governing bodies (such as removing or failing to provide on-campus polling locations) or the indirect result of combinations of policies (such as a combination of purposeful campus gerrymandering and strict rules regulating which precincts residents must vote in).” In order to illustrate some of the consequences of “direct” and “indirect” limitations on student voting locations, Gonzalez hoped to generate a few maps of egregious examples. We worked together before publication to produce two figures to accompany his essay.

Figure 1 (below) represents the current election precinct boundaries in Hays County, Texas. Gonzalez chose to highlight precincts that contain Texas State University (TSU), a large public university in Hays County, because “TSU is home to 38,661 students, over 7,000 of whom live on campus, with thousands more living in private housing in the immediate vicinity.” Gonzalez writes:

The lines are winding, though at first glance they may not look inherently illogical. However, overlaying features of the campus reveals the distorted way in which the community is carved into different precincts. Some of what appear to be streets on the precinct map are in fact merely paper streets or walking paths. Perhaps the most absurd result is that the Student Center, which has housed the only on-campus voting location ever used, is bisected by the precinct lines.

Figure 2 shows where many of the major on-campus residences are located—a confusing distribution between precincts by any measure, with no clear or logical dividing lines for which residential halls are assigned to which precinct. Figure 2 also shows Hays County’s proposal for the intended placement of its Election Day poll sites prior to our threatening litigation. State law permits combining precincts into one polling place under certain circumstances. The county originally intended to combine each of the two primarily on-campus precincts with two off-campus precincts, meaning that students in those precincts would have to travel off-campus (approximately 2.2 miles in one case and 1.7 miles in the other) to cast their ballot. On top of figuring out the complicated and illogical assignment of residence halls to different precincts, students (many of whom lack transportation) would have had to find a way to get to these polling locations. One of the polling locations is separated from campus by a highway. If a student showed up at the wrong location, she would have to travel 3.4 miles in the opposite direction to reach the correct location.

I made these maps in QGIS and used Stamen toner basemaps. You can read Gonzalez’ full piece here.