North Texas neighborhoods with low voter participation are stuck in a “vicious cycle” that often leaves them overlooked and under-resourced, a frustrating situation for community leaders who hope to expand the clout of underrepresented communities.
“It’s a Catch-22,” said Ramiro Luna, co-founder and executive director of Somos Tejas, which focuses on increasing civic engagement among Latinos.
Luna, a former immigration activist and veteran political operative, blames a “flawed” political system that makes winning elections more important than civic participation, compelling candidates and campaigns to invest most heavily on high-participation voters who tend to be older, white, wealthy and college educated.
Campaigns operate, Luna said, on an attitude of, “Well, these communities are not turning out, so let’s not invest in them.”
“Well, of course they’re not going to turn out — because no one is investing in them,” he said. “And so it’s this kind of vicious cycle that continues: No one invests in these communities, the communities don’t turn out and so forth.”
The Dallas Morning News has launched Back to the Ballot, an effort to educate voters on the election process and explore the causes of voter apathy and potential solutions.
Focusing on high-turnout areas often comes at the expense of trying to reach people who typically don’t cast ballots. Get-out-the-vote efforts marginally improve turnout but don’t make the electorate more representative, political scientists say, because the people targeted are already the most likely to vote.
“The problem is so big that it’s going to require all of us to invest,” Luna said, referring to candidates, campaigns, political parties, nonprofits, advocacy groups and governments. “The biggest hurdle is having political parties and different campaigns have the courage to invest in the low-performing turnout communities, and that’s what is lacking: real investment in the form of time and money and energy.”
March to the Polls is a Dallas nonprofit that educates North Texas high school students on voting and registers eligible seniors to vote. The organization has registered more than 50,000 voters — including 33,000 students — since its founding in 2015, according to its website.
When March to the Polls began working with school districts, it found that many students believed their votes didn’t matter.
“A lot of it had to do with this vicious cycle of also believing elected officials didn’t care about their opinion, which reinforced this idea that their vote then doesn’t matter,” said Camila Correa Bourdeau, executive director of March to the Polls, which also strives to increase voting by people of color.
“The way we break this vicious cycle is by voting,” she said. “Then elected officials are paying more attention to you.”
The Texas High School Voter Registration Act requires principals to serve as a deputy voter registrar, though they can also designate an administrative staffer or a teacher to perform the role in their stead. During the last month of each semester, high school deputy registrars are required to distribute voter registration applications and a notice on how to return a completed form. Research by the University of Houston Election Lab found only a quarter of Texas high schools complied with the law.
Correa Bourdeau said March to the Polls is often “the first and last exposure” North Texas public school students of color have to voter education, while many private schools have a staff member dedicated to civics.
The Texas Organizing Project engages in year-round community building and outreach to Black and Latino communities in Dallas, Harris and Bexar counties. It also transports people to City Hall, the Dallas County Commissioners Court and the state Capitol in Austin.
David Villalobos, TOP’s political director, said the organization engages Black and Latino North Texans on bread-and-butter issues, including health care access, public school resources and immigration, in addition to encouraging them to vote.
“Most politicians are going to be responsive to communities that vote,” Villalobos said. “We’re trying to motivate people to come out in droves to be able to hold politicians accountable to the conditions in their communities.”
Voting is not always a priority for people struggling to survive, he said.
“We definitely try to have powerful conversations to get them to understand and believe we can make a difference if we come together at the ballot box and elect the right individuals to office,” Villalobos said.
Anthony Fowler, a University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professor who wrote his dissertation on voter turnout a decade ago at Harvard University, framed voting as a collective action problem. In an interview, he argued that while no individual vote is likely to swing a presidential or statewide election, voting determines “whose interests are represented and what incentives there are for politicians.”
“Collectively, it matters for policy outcomes if everybody votes. It could change the outcomes of elections, and even if it doesn’t, it changes the incentives of elected officials,” Fowler said.
“Your governor knows that if everyone’s voting, they have to make sure they do a good job and cater to the interests of everybody rather than just a subset of people who are voting. So there are huge policy consequences of collectively who votes in elections,” he said.
In interviews, North Texas community leaders pointed to areas where turnout — good and bad — affected decisions that impacted neighborhoods and lives.
Pleasant Grove has turnout as low as 2% in school board races, Correa Bourdeau said. Fewer than 2,600 ballots were cast in May’s election for Dallas ISD’s Board of Trustees District 9, which includes parts of Pleasant Grove. Turnout in District 1, which includes North and Northwest Dallas, more than doubled District 9.
In May 2022, only 946 ballots were cast for the race in District 4, which also includes parts of Pleasant Grove. Camile White won that election over Karla Garcia by 32 votes, 489-457.
“It’s not anything to be proud of, but in higher-voting areas that happen to have more resources, generally wealthier families, you have 13% turnout for a school board race,” she said. “Generally, there is a correlation between schools in those areas getting more resources and attention and schools in an area like Pleasant Grove. It has such low turnout that it has less access to resources.”
The neighborhood got its first magnet school, the School for the Talented and Gifted, in 2018. Dallas ISD has more than 30 magnet programs.
J.A. Armstrong, president and CEO of Builders of Hope Community Development Corp., an urban development organization that focuses on housing and community transformation initiatives, said West Dallas — where he grew up and lives — had lacked investment until the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge was completed in 2012.
“As a result of that bridge, the neighborhood is experiencing rapid displacement — gentrification, and what we really call neighborhood change,” Armstrong said. “But it is a neighborhood and a community that is filled with your hard-working, blue collar, gritty families. It has gone through environmental injustice. It has gone through the lack of public infrastructure. It has gone through just about any social stress that you could put a neighborhood through, and it’s still resilient.”
Armstrong highlighted reports of West Dallas residents in 2015 unsuccessfully fighting against the relocation of a concrete plant in the Trinity Groves “restaurant theme park” to their neighborhood, less than a mile from a middle school that was impacted by lead poisoning in the 1970s and 1980s. Residents who attended a City Hall meeting “almost universally” opposed the relocation, according to the Dallas Observer. Their councilwoman supported it anyway.
“There is a direct link to the lack of public and private investment to voter apathy because when the local municipality does not invest in a local neighborhood, it gives the voter space to question, ‘Why should I care if others don’t?’” he said. “You have this suppressed respect for the Black and brown voice in the political process, as if individuals who have lesser means shouldn’t have as much influence in the political process.”
Billy Lane is executive director of the Innercity Community Development Corp., which works primarily in South Dallas and Fair Park — areas, he said, with a history of racial inequity in city services, investment, land use, education and health care.
Lane is also senior pastor of Camp Wisdom United Methodist Church, and he said his message from the pulpit is to vote — but not vote and walk away. He emphasizes the greater impact “when voices come together … as opposed to people speaking by themselves.”
“This is about policy, and people in office help shape policy,” Lane said. “The people who vote for them help shape policy, and if we don’t shape policy, then all the things that we do — all the houses we build, all the jobs that we help get people into — can be wiped out in a matter of almost literally in the blink of an eye.”
Armstrong said the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package signed into law in 2021, “equated to real dollars to support our mission of affordable housing.” And he credited the Texas Legislature for passing a property tax law that cut taxes for West Dallas residents.
“It might be slow,” he said. “It might be held up by bureaucracy, but change can happen the more that we get the right people in the right positions.”
Armstrong challenges young people to resist getting discouraged by social media misinformation and to participate in the electoral process, arguing that they have a particular responsibility to be engaged, research, read, listen, show up and “take up space.”
“Because when you don’t take up space, somebody else speaks for you,” he said. “And you can’t be frustrated with the results if you gave that space to somebody else.”
Correa Bourdeau, who works with students at March to the Polls, said her message to young or first-time voters is that they have valuable expertise.
“You’re living in your community. You’re going to the schools. You’re working in your cities,” she said. “You have first-hand experience with what’s going well or what’s not going well as a community member. Your perspective is an expert perspective.
“I don’t want anybody to think that they don’t know enough to participate and for that to be a barrier in turning out to vote. I always tell people you get better with practice. Even if you vote for somebody that turns out not to be so great once they’re in office, then you get to try again the next time,” Correa Bourdeau said.
