Prairie View Chapter of the NAACP, et al. v. Oliver S. Kitzman
In the lead-up to the primary-round elections in 2004, Waller County District
Attorney Oliver S. Kitzman had threatened Prairie View students with prosecution
for casting a ballot. In violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s
protection of the fundamental right to vote and Section 11(b) of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, Kitzman claimed that students in Waller County did
not enjoy the same presumption of residency for voting purposes as other
county residents. In addition, the Waller County Commissioners’
Court violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by reducing the number
of days for early voting at the polling place nearest Prairie View from
two to one without prior approval from the Justice Department. Early voting
was important in the 2004 election cycle, as the Texas primary would occur
during Prairie View’s spring break.
In representing the NAACP’s Prairie View
chapter, Weil Gotshal led back-to-back lawsuits, one addressing the DA’s
violations, and the other addressing violations of the Commissioners’
Court. The actions were settled in February 2004 with the result
that the county’s district attorney agreed to issue a written public apology,
the county would maintain open facilities to provide 17 hours of early-round
voting (just as in the previous election), and the DA’s office would create
a criminal justice intern position for Prairie View students as well as
meet monthly with a school liaison to discuss student concerns.
Weil Gotshal was joined by the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as co-counsel; the ACLU and NAACP
joined the cases as counsel.
These cases were important both on a local
and national level. Locally, this was not the first time that the
voting status of Prairie View students had been challenged. In 1978, a
federal court ordered the Waller County Registrar of Voters to register
students as county residents, and the attorney general of Texas had recently
confirmed the 1978 order. More broadly, given the lesson of the 2000
presidential campaign that every vote counts, the case confirmed the importance
of ensuring that local officials do not create unlawful impediments to
exercising the right to vote.