A few weeks shy of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, El Paso Community College finance student Raul Triste-Herrera is excited to exercise his political voice. He’s in the minority – a young adult who wants to vote.
“I try to encourage (family and friends) about voting, but they are more influenced by social media,” he said last week as he manned a Tejano Mercado table outside the Transmountain Campus library.
The Horizon City resident, who expects to graduate with an associate degree in December, registered to vote in 2024 in time for the presidential election.
For the 2022 midterm election, El Paso County registered 108,271 voters from the ages of 18 to 29. Of that number, a little more than 20% voted. That’s one out of five.
Whether El Paso’s young adults show up at the polls for this year’s midterms remains to be seen, but election officials are optimistic as more young voters cast ballots – lowering the median age of voters.
Marco A. Covarrubias, El Paso County Elections Department training coordinator supervisor, said he has noticed an incremental increase in participation of young adult voters.
Covarrubias said the median age for voters during the 2024 primaries was 64 for Democrats and 61 for Republicans.
For this year’s March primaries, the median age for Democrats dropped to 58, whereas the GOP median age rose to 62. Additionally, the number of voters ages 18-34 from both parties went from 1,100 in 2024 to 4,000 this year.
“Obviously, the lowering of the median age was driven entirely by the (youth) vote,” Covarrubias said.
The elections supervisor said that students he has spoken with this year appear more interested in the top-of-the-ticket candidates at the state and federal levels. He believes that the young voters have “tuned in” to those races.
“That drives interest as much as our efforts,” Covarrubias said. “The candidates matter a whole lot when it comes to voter interest and I think that’s behind the recent surge in young voter interest.”
Crystal A. Robert, an EPCC speech communication coordinator, has been involved in voter education programs since 2016. She said the students she speaks with are less engaged politically, but she said the issue was not apathy but confusion.
Robert said many students believe that registering to vote means they need to commit to a political party, and that discourages them. The coordinator, who has directed a poll worker grant program since 2024, said even students who served as election workers are reluctant to vote.
“Despite having voter guides and other information readily accessible to them, they’re still hesitant to cast a ballot,” she said in an email exchange, but did not offer a reason.
The two most recent midterm elections, in 2018 and 2022, show that El Paso County had 102,303 and 108,271 young adults who registered to vote, respectively.
The voting records show that young adult turnout was a little more than 32% in 2018 and almost 20% in 2022. The 2018 vote included the race for a Texas U.S. Senate seat between incumbent Ted Cruz and El Pasoan and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
Barbara Sanchez, EPCC assistant professor of government, said she reminds students to be prepared voters and teaches them how to find reliable sources of information to evaluate different perspectives to make educated decisions.
She said her courses involve students who organize voter registration drives alongside non-partisan organizations such as the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and the El Paso County Elections Department.
When it comes to elections, Sanchez said her students are either eager to participate or skeptical that their vote will matter. Regardless, more of them understand that elections influence their lives in education, the economy and future opportunities.
“Creating a classroom environment where students can discuss political issues respectfully and think critically, without being told what to believe, can help prepare them to become engaged citizens,” said Sanchez, who has taught at EPCC since 2018.
Melissa Martin, elections information and resource coordinator for the El Paso County Elections Department, said some EPCC campuses and the University of Texas at El Paso have served as voting sites since 2006. Western Technical College, 9624 Plaza Circle, east of Loop 375 has been a polling site since the 2020 primaries. Texas Tech Health El Paso will be an Election Day voting site this year.
Martin said her office uses these sites to make voting as easy as possible for the registered voters. The elections office decides on sites based on “fair representation” to best serve precincts and convenience for voters.
Yael Bromberg, an adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, said some young adult voting rights are under attack such as their ability to use a mail-in ballot and the high rate of provisional ballot rejections.
Bromberg helped develop the Youth Voting Rights Act, which U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, reintroduced last week. Among its points is to allow college students to use their student identification cards as a voter ID, and to get student assistance offices in colleges and universities to serve as voter registration agencies.
The author and co-editor of 2025’s “Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses” is a national expert on voting rights. She spoke recently to reporters affiliated with Open Campus, an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit news group focused on higher education issues.
“Studies show that if you vote when you’re young, that voting is habit forming, that you’ll continue to vote,” said Bromberg, who added that polling locations on college campuses often see a 5% to 7% boost in voter engagement.
This year marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the 26th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s the one that lowered the voting age in federal, state and local elections from 21 to 18. It was ratified July 1, 1971, by the necessary three-fourths of the states, or 38. It was the fastest authorization of a constitutional amendment in U.S. history – 107 days.
There was some interest in lowering the voting age during World War II after President Franklin Roosevelt lowered the draft age from 21 to 18 to get more troops into service, but it did not gain traction despite the slogan, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” The issue came up again in the 1960s when college-age students protested the Vietnam War.
According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, 62% of U.S. citizens ages 18-29 were registered to vote for the 2022 midterm elections compared with 56% of young citizens in Texas. There is no similar figure for El Paso County.
CIRCLE estimated that as of Sept. 1, there were 2% more young adults registered to vote nationally now than four years ago. Among Latino voters, who make up 22% of potential voters nationally, there is a 6% increase. Texas has had a 7% increase since 2022.
Key Dates: 2026 General Election
- Oct. 5: Last day to register to vote
- If you’re registering to vote for the first time, you must be a citizen of the United States and must be 18 years old by Election Day.
- Oct. 19: First day of early voting
- Oct. 23: Last day to apply for a ballot by mail
- College students who are out-of-state residents have three options. They can request an absentee or mail-in ballot from their home state, return to their home state to vote in person, or update their registration to vote in Texas if they meet the residency requirements. Each state has its own deadlines and procedures so students should contact their home county’s election office for specific instructions.
- Oct. 30: Last day of early voting
- Nov. 3: Election Day
Register to vote: epcountyvotestx.gov
The post El Paso’s young voter numbers are strong. Will they show up to the polls? appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More