Six months have passed since the Dallas Mavericks hosted the American Airlines Center’s last event on the evening of the league’s suspension. Its doors reopen to the public Tuesday, just not as a sporting venue. The arena, rather, has been repurposed as Dallas County’s largest voting center, a landing spot for registered voters during both the state’s early voting period (Oct. 13-30) and Election Day (Nov. 3).
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This first-time voting center serves several important purposes, most notably providing a larger building with ample space and better circulation that should provide a safer, quicker voting process during the ongoing pandemic. The Mavericks believe that can help turnout. “The size of the AAC allows us to offer more people the chance to vote in less time which hopefully will lead to more people voting,” Mark Cuban told The Athletic via email. When the NBA resumed its season in July – and particularly since players went on strike during the opening round of the postseason – it put an emphasis on promoting voting. You probably saw the word Vote blazoned across players’ shooting jackets. Texas, which finished just 42nd in the nation in the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots during the 2018 midterms, could use the help.
There are many reasons for Texas’ consistently low voter turnout, including ongoing efforts by the state’s government to keep voter registration difficult and serve egregious punishments in response to minor violations of voter law. It won’t help that the overall number of polling locations open on Election Day has also plummeted by more than 200 in Dallas County as compared to the 2016 general election. (The Dallas Observer reported last month that more locations could be added – but county officials stopped replying when pushed for details.)
“We need as many voting locations that are open, period,” Daniel Scarpace says. “I’m not sure if (the American Airlines Center as a voting center) is fixing the (voting) problems we’ve had in the past.”
But Scarpace, an assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Arlington who has focused on local voter registration, believes it can help in other ways. One reason registered voters choose not to vote is not knowing where to do so or how to find out. “But people know about this because they know about the Mavs, they know about the Stars,” Scarpace says. In one recent conversation in his volunteer role as a deputy voter registrar, a potential voter expressed excitement about voting at the American Airlines Center. “I was like, ‘Cool, I don’t know if that’s the closest place to you or not, but if you already know about it, I don’t need to intervene,’” Scarpace says. A 2008 study conducted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy found evidence that large, centrally located voting centers do promote turnout from voters who might be otherwise unengaged.
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One legitimate reason for the decrease in voting locations is their reclassification as voting centers, which means registered Dallas County voters can vote at any location regardless of their voting precinct, including the American Airlines Center. (This includes both the early voting period and Election Day.) Texas has also increased its early voting period by one week. With the American Airlines Center being recognizable, centrally located and accessible by public transport, it’s likely it will receive the largest share of voters over the coming weeks in what some Dallas County officials predict will be a record turnout.
The Mavericks don’t own the American Airlines Center, and thus their effort to turn it into a voting center was more about connecting the arena’s management with the Dallas County Election Office. (They aren’t involved in its operations or logistics in the coming weeks.) Ivy Awino, however, recalls conversations within the Mavericks organization happening about the potential of the American Airlines Center as a voting center happening in late June. That month, her role shifted from providing gameday vibes – you might know her better as DJ Poizon Ivy – to senior manager of corporate social responsibility. Since then, she has led and been involved in much of the team’s “Mavs Take Action” plan, which has committed $5 million and 10,000 volunteer employee hours to the Dallas community over the next three years.
“The Mavs Take Action plan is the Mavericks’ commitment to breathing more life and democracy into our local communities,” Awino says. “We know the pursuit of social-justice work and the pursuit of racial equality is longer than three years, but we hope to have a time period where we can reflect how much we were able to do knowing that we’re in this for the long haul.”
This commitment being manifested in far too many initiatives to list. A notable one, though, was a voting registration drive last month. That’s important. With Texas being one of the few remaining states without online voter registration or same-day registration, the burden has increasingly fallen on private organizations stepping in.
In the past, this would usually only include activism and political parties. But voting, a nonpartisan civic duty, can and increasingly has been promoted by larger organizations such as the NBA and the Mavericks. While Cuban says he “hasn’t even thought” about whether the American Airlines Center could continue in its role as a voting center, he has committed to this increased role – led by employees like Awino – in being civic leaders in this community.
“I may be responsible for the finances of the Mavs, but all of North Texas truly owns the Mavs,” he says via email. “We are part of this community and responsible to them in many ways. Our ability to host voting was just one important way to be supportive.”
(Photo: Glenn James/NBAE via Getty Images)
