San Marcos High School students volunteer at polls

Casting a vote isn’t the only way to be civically engaged. For several San Marcos High School students, it meant spending the day working the polls.

While Hays County voters lined up to cast their ballots on Tuesday, 14 students volunteered as poll workers. 

Elections Administrator Jennifer Anderson said she and a teacher were able to arrange to have the students spend the day aiding in vote center operations.

Sebastian Russo, a junior at San Marcos High School, said he is the president of a Junior State of America chapter at the school. 

“What we do is we try to fight apathy, like political apathy, and engage our members to be, you know, civically active and community involved and oriented,” Russo said. “So this is one of the examples of something that we do and we do this, you know, kind of fairly regularly things like this.”

Even though he hasn’t reached the legal voting age, Russo said the students were able to get an interesting look at how the voting process works. 

“Especially with the new electronic system it's pretty interesting,” he said. “So I think one interesting feature that I noticed was that upon submitting your paper ballot, you'll submit it and then it counts electronically, but it also keeps it underneath so we can recount paper. So if we need to recount we can trust a number verified by by paper.”

Dani McNabb, a senior and president of San Marcos High School’s student council, said working at the poll was a cool way to become involved. 

“You know, I think this is a really interesting like cool way for us to become involved and kind of learn about the system even before we get to vote,” McNabb said. “So to kind of help us for next year when we get to vote.”