What would it take to bring polling locations to UM campus?

Gordon said she would be “very much” more likely to vote if there were polling locations on campus. But in lieu of that option, using public transportation to get to polling locations off-campus is an option she had not considered.

The task of implementing on campus polling locations would be so challenging it borders on impossible, according to Lafayette County Circuit Clerk Jeff Busby.

The issue lies primarily with geography — the various representatives any one student might have, depending on where they live in the county, might not match to a potential campus polling location.

“The problem with having a voting precinct on campus is that your voting precinct has to be in the district that represents you. So, you can’t just put a voting precinct and say, ‘Students can vote here,’ because one person’s supervisor as an Ole Miss student and another person’s supervisor as an Ole Miss student might be different,” Busby said.

Busby oversees voting and redistricting in the county. Redistricting is the process of drawing the lines in a given area that determine election districts.

“If you did anything, you’d probably have to take (the university) like a pie and divide it into five locations and try to get as close to each of these precincts as you possibly could,” he said.

Even then, Busby explained, logistical issues remain. There can be no such thing as “student specific” polling locations — any polling locations opened on campus would have to be open to everyone in the county, which would lead to traffic and parking issues on election days.

And even if the county could be redistricted in such a way that five polling locations for the five districts in the county could be opened on campus, that’s only a straightforward solution for countywide elections. There are entirely different districting maps for state representatives. In Lafayette County alone, any person could be represented

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“That’s what would make it almost impossible to have a voting precinct on campus,” Busby said.

Currently, there are public transportation options available to all polling locations, according to Busby. He also explained that there have been conversations with the university about moving the furthest polling location, which is currently located near Krystal’s on Highway 6, back to its former location at the Jackson Avenue Center, which the university now owns.

“I do think moving polling locations closer to campus or even setting up additional polling locations that are closer to campus would help,” Alex Mobley, a Chinese major at the University of Mississippi said. “However, I do think this would have a minimal impact if the polling location itself is not physically on campus or extremely near campus,” Mobley is a student leader for UM Voting Ambassadors, a program out of UM’s Center

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Specifically, Mobley thinks that transportation on election days and a campus-wide holiday on election days would be of great benefit.

“One of the biggest issues is that a lot of students cannot just take off on a Tuesday if they have class, especially during November. I have learned that any small inconvenience is enough to deter many people from voting,” he said.

Despite all proposed changes, Mobely sees informing people about how to register, how to vote and how to decide who to vote for as the most important parts of increasing election participation among young people.

“Students are very busy and putting all the pressure on them to do these things often means that they are not likely to vote at all,” he said. “By increasing accessibility to such resources and helping students find them

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According to a study conducted by Duke and MTV, during the 2020 election, 74% of college campuses did not have any in-person voting options on campus. No university campus in Mississippi has an on campus voting option.

While on campus polling locations seem to be an impossibility, Busby encourages students to vote before election day by casting an absentee ballot.

“If you’re a student, and you’re in class that day and can’t make it to a voting place, you can always come here (the Lafayette County Courthouse) and vote absentee. Absentee voting starts 45 days before election day,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s a student on that campus that is not on this square already sometime within that 45 days. It’s not a permanent fix, but it’s the best I can think of with the way our laws are now.”

Grace Strieker contributed reporting.

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