Tarrant County, Texas Just Made It Harder to Vote
Tarrant County's Commissioners Court voted 3-2 Tuesday to strip 92 polling places from the county's Election Day map, cutting the November ballot-casting options for more than 1.3 million registered voters just two months before a midterm election both parties are calling the most consequential in a generation.
The new list leaves 224 Election Day sites and 47 early-voting locations — down from 316 and 50, respectively, in the 2022 midterms. That's a reduction of nearly 30% in a county that has only grown since then. The vote came after an eight-hour meeting and testimony from more than 100 speakers, the overwhelming majority of whom opposed the cuts, and after 30 civic groups rallied outside the courthouse that morning demanding the county keep 2022-level access.
Every Republican on the court — County Judge Tim O'Hare and commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez — voted for the reduction. Both Democrats, Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr., voted no. Simmons, who is challenging O'Hare for county judge in November, didn't mince words: "It's not about cost. This is about power. This is very political. This is campaigning from the dais."
The cuts land squarely on the communities that can least absorb them. Speaker Cynnamon Hall told commissioners the 76104 zip code — a majority-Black and Latino part of Fort Worth — would have no polling site at all under the new map. That warning tracks with what national voting-rights organizations have been saying for weeks: the Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and the Campaign Legal Center wrote to the county arguing the plan would disproportionately hit Black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. LDF policy director Demetria McCain called it flatly what it is: "a voter suppression tactic designed to impede Black voters and other voters of color from exercising their right to vote at the polls."
Commissioners also rejected a push to restore the Maverick Activity Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, over objections that the county was making it needlessly hard for students to vote on their own campus. Emeri Callaway of the Tarrant County Young Democrats said students across the county were "panicking" about where they'd even be able to cast a ballot. Republicans countered that a county subcourthouse nearby would suffice — a substitution that ignores how much foot traffic, and how many first-time voters a campus polling site actually generates.
County elections administrator Clint Ludwig, who built the map Republicans approved, insists it merely "concentrates locations where voters choose to vote" and meets accessibility standards. O'Hare has pointed to an average distance of under three miles between voters and their new polling site as proof nothing is being suppressed. But distance on paper doesn't capture what actually keeps people from voting: longer lines at fewer sites, unpredictable commutes for shift workers and renters without cars, and confusion over whether the place someone voted in 2022 or 2024 even exists anymore. Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico put the stakes plainly at a news conference last weekend: cutting nearly a third of the county's sites means "longer commutes, longer lines and lower voter turnout, especially in our Black and brown communities."
This is also not the county's first attempt at drawing lines that favor the party in power. Republicans on the same court used population growth to justify a more GOP-friendly redistricting map last year — and are now waving away that same population growth as a reason to add polling sites this year. Commissioner Matt Krause dismissed calls to match 2022's total as "arbitrary," even as Tarrant has added tens of thousands of residents since then.
Thirty miles away, Dallas County commissioners considered their own site list the same day and landed on 448 Election Day locations and 85 for early voting — proof that a big, fast-growing county can choose abundance over austerity when it comes to ballot access.
Tarrant County voters now have less room for error. Early voting runs Oct. 19-30, Election Day is Nov. 3, and the registration deadline is Oct. 5. With fewer sites and higher stakes, voters who don't plan ahead risk finding their old polling place gone.
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