After nearly a decade of milestones in Taylor Toynes’ corner of southern Dallas, the one coming in November gives the community organizer a particular sense of accomplishment: A brand new presidential election polling site in one of the most impoverished ZIP codes in the nation.
The polling location – inside a repurposed YMCA run by the nonprofit For Oak Cliff – represents a new pillar of empowerment for an oppressed community with all the risk factors of low voter participation, said Toynes, the group’s co-founder and CEO.
The mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhood is near Central Expressway and I-35E. Fewer than half of its residents are employed, according to 2022 census data, and just 10% of the people in the 75216 ZIP code have college degrees. A third live below the federal poverty line.
Come November, neighbors will be able to enter a familiar location – the site also offers GED classes, job training, meal distribution services and an affordable farmer’s market – to participate in the high-stakes race for the White House.
“We just want to be a vessel for our community. People can come in and become their best selves – and now they can even come in and vote in the presidential election,” he said. “If you think of a logic model of a program, that’s golden. It’s very special.”
Community-based organizations like For Oak Cliff play a vital role in efforts to improve voter participation in a state with chronically low turnout. But they are just one player in a constantly changing game to overcome barriers such as mistrust in the system, restrictive laws, lack of information, polarizing politics, no transportation or proper ID and difficult work or child-care situations.
Texas boasts its highest registration rate in 20 years during this election cycle, at 82% of voting-age residents, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. That’s due to the work of grassroots organizations, local party chapters and local officials.
Even so, the state ranks near the bottom in getting voters to the polls.
In the November 2020 presidential election, Texas reached a historic 67% turnout rate – attributed largely to the heated campaign but also due to relaxed voting restrictions during the pandemic. That was still lower than the national rate of nearly 90% of registered voters, another all-time high, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Texas rate plummeted to 46% for the 2022 midterms, after the laws were reinstated and interest dropped with no presidential race on the ballot. In Dallas County, more than 66% of registered voters turned out for the November 2020 election, a rate that dropped to 44% two years later.
Turnout is even lower during the critical primary elections that can effectively decide races because the majority of Texans live in heavily Republican or heavily Democratic districts. The Texas primaries in March drew only 18% of registered voters – well under the national rate of 23%. In Dallas County the rate was 16%.
Experts say voter apathy, logistical issues and barriers inherent in some election systems – such as the number and location of polling stations or lots of requirements to register – are still the biggest hurdles to participation, both in Texas and nationally.
On Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News is launching “Back To The Ballot,” an effort to educate voters on the election process and explore the causes of voter apathy and potential solutions.
Registration challenges pull attention, resources
Texas’ population continues to surge and change, with the number of residents growing by half a million in just the last year and the Dallas-Fort Worth area attracting more newcomers than any other in the nation in 2023, according to census data released earlier this year.
Maintaining registration levels in a state that has added more than 9 million residents since 2000 requires a Herculean effort, advocates say – one they say isn’t made easier by some of the most restrictive elections laws in the country.
For example, while almost half the states let voters register on the same day they vote, Texas requires registration to be completed 30 days before election day. Unlike more than 40 states, Texas doesn’t allow universal online voter registration.
The effort needed to locate and sign up potential Texas voters drains resources from political parties and grassroots groups that could more effectively be used to address immediate barriers to voting like pushing for civic education or providing transportation, said David de la Fuente, senior political analyst at Third Way, a national center-left think tank.
Advocates “have to waste so much money registering people to vote in a way that their counterparts in other parts of the country do not,” de la Fuente said. “It’s astronomically different.”
In some cases, the government steps in to help potential voters navigate the registration and voting system through public awareness efforts.
“We’re aiming for different audiences, different demographics, just wanting to make sure that we can get information across the board to everyone who’s interested … and everybody who is an eligible voter,” said Heider Garcia, the county’s elections administrator.
Nonprofits try to fix lack of proper ID and other logistical barriers.
Many other community-based organizations, Garcia said, are also “stepping up and saying, ‘How do we help?’”
Those groups are crucial to the voter registration effort, party officials and activists on both sides of the aisle say.
That’s partly because voters tend to trust nonpartisan nonprofits more than they do political parties and government agencies when it comes to politics, according to a 2024 study by Nonprofit VOTE, which supports voter efforts by nonprofits across the country.
The report found that voters engaged by nonprofits saw a 10% boost in turnout compared to those engaged by other groups. Nonprofits are also more likely to turnout underrepresented voters, such as young people, lower-income voters and people of color.
In 2022, the League of Women’s Voters launched what it called its most comprehensive effort in its history to increase voter engagement and targeted young people, newly naturalized citizens, and formerly and currently incarcerated people. The group signed up nearly a quarter-million new voters ahead of the midterm elections.
The group hosted more than 600 registration events run by some 450 volunteers across the country on National Voter Registration Day in September 2022, signing up new voters at libraries, festivals, colleges, food pantries, naturalization ceremonies and farmers markets.
Eighty-seven chapters hosted 1,000 events focused on registered new young voters and signed up some 22,800 at high schools and community colleges. The league staged registration drives at 676 naturalization ceremonies and registered some 35,400 brand new citizens for the first time.
On a sunny Saturday in early August in Dallas, For Oak Cliff hosted its annual Back to School festival beneath the trees at its south Dallas location. Among the backpacks and school supplies, a handful of volunteers registered voters at a booth run by the Dallas Fort Worth Urban League of Young Professionals.
Registration is at the heart of the chapter’s mission “to share the importance of our voice,” its website says. Over the years, the group has registered more than 10,000 people to vote, text messaged more than 20,000 potential voters and visited 2,500 homes to talk about voting, the site says.
Barriers to registration often translate to hurdles faced when trying to get to the polls.
Logistical problems can include a lack of transportation to polling places, mobility issues, child care challenges, or the inability to get time off work to vote – things that make it difficult to vote even if they want to participate.
Nonpartisan grassroots groups and civic organizations in Texas say the populations they focus on – mostly the more needy residents who are seeking several types of services – also face problems navigating the system.
That can include lacking proper identification, needing to update their address on voter registration after a move, no education on where to register or time to go to a location to do it, illiteracy or similar issues, or being without a stable address and therefore unable to receive notices and registration forms.
They are more likely to occur among people of color, older voters, students, lower-income voters, rural residents, language minority groups, people with disabilities, unhoused people, military members overseas, and those with felony convictions, according to data by several research and advocacy groups, as well as the federal government.
MOVE Texas works to register and educate voters on college campuses, in coffee shops and even along riverbanks as potential voters float by on inner tubes. But the group also serves as a clearing house for students having trouble with the technicalities of the system.
“Young voters are frequently in transitional phases,” Gómez said. “That is why meeting young voters where they are is central to our work.”
Removing barriers to voting is critical to the group’s larger mission because people can’t be empowered if they don’t have a voice in their own representation – and they can’t have a voice in their own representation if they are disempowered in the rest of their lives, Toynes said.
In addition to providing a ballot box, For Oak Cliff offers education and job training, works with youth to raise self-confidence and independence, runs summer camps and evening programs for youth and adults, and facilitates access to affordable food, school supplies and child care.
“Our full mission is that we aim to liberate Oak Cliff from systemic oppression through a culture of education, while increasing social mobility and social capital,” Toynes said. “We operate from the thought of, ‘From embryo to success.’”
United Way of Metropolitan Dallas partnered with Nonprofit VOTE sought to build on the trust communities have for their nonprofits earlier this summer, hosting a workshop in June to teach those groups how to increase voter engagement in their communities, including instruction on best practices on voter education, how to build relationships with local communities, and how to create an effective voter engagement plan.
The training was offered to seven area nonprofit groups: Bachman Lake Together, Faith in Texas, March to the Polls, DFW Metro NAACP, Prism Health North Texas, SAAVETX Education Fund and Somos Tejas.
“Through our collective advocacy, we can build a stronger democracy and empower everyone to have a voice at the ballot box,” Hillary Evans, vice president of policy and advocacy at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, said in a June statement to Nonprofit VOTE.
Voter apathy fortifies existing barriers
Texas’ voter apathy is a highly nuanced problem, with causes ranging from lack of interest in the choice or a lack of engagement with candidates, confusion over issues on the ballot, fatigue with negative campaigns and partisan politics, and mistrust in voting systems or politics in general, said Jan Leighley, a government professor at American University in Washington, D.C.
The problem exacerbates already existing logistical hurdles and pushes voting down a long list of more immediate life challenges like food, shelter and child care, said Leighley, a former Texas A&M University political science professor who specializes in voting patterns and behavior.
“Politics just isn’t a priority,” Leighley said. “We’re talking about getting people to do something. You can agree that it’s good for them, it’s good for the country. But they still have to do it.”
Voter apathy can be tied, in part, to socioeconomic factors, but the divisiveness present in modern-day elections can play out as frustratingly low participation even in high turnout states, experts say.
Oregon has had some of the highest voter turnout rates in the nation in recent elections. Since 1998, the solidly blue state has sent every registered voter a ballot through the mail a few weeks before every election, whether they plan to vote or not. The program has been credited with keeping the state in the top 10% in voter turnout for two decades.
But even Oregon, with more than 66% of its registered voters showing up in November 2022 – compared with fewer than half those in Texas – still has a turnout problem when four out of every 10 potential voters stays home, advocates say.
In an interview with Oregon Public Radio, former secretary of state Phil Keisling noted nearly half of the Oregon voters aren’t registered with a party — signaling voter fatigue with the partisan nature of modern elections, which contributes to people choosing to sit them out.
“It’s the responsibility of the parties to reach out,” he said. “[But] I think it’s the responsibility of all of us to look at ways that we can actively engage more voters.”
Raising interest in races
Conservative grassroots in South Texas lean heavily on the notion that the most hesitant voters are would-be Republican voters who rarely see candidates they agree with on the ballot, said veteran GOP political consultant Wayne Hamilton, founder of Project Red TX.
Project Red TX works to supply a stream of well-funded candidates to energize races that for area decades had been limited to choices between Democrats.
In Hamilton’s view,the best way to motivate voters to the polls is to give them a compelling reason to go.
When Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, was running the hardest campaign of his political career against Republican challenger David Covey during the March 2024 primaries, turnout shot up by a collective 10,500 votes in his somewhat rural East Texas district.
Phelan, who was favored to lose outright, survived the primary by 1,300 votes and was re-elected in a runoff by fewer than 400.
“You want to increase turnout, you have to put competitive races out there, and people are going to get interested,” Hamilton said. “Organically more people are going to get registered, and you’ll have a lot more people involved because now they have a choice.”
CORRECTION, 5:25 p.m., Sept. 23, 2024: National voter turnout for the 2020 presidential election was 90% of registered voters. An earlier version of this story had that number incorrect.