The third-most populous county in Texas will have nearly a third fewer polling places this November after Republican county commissioners dramatically reduced the number of polling locations in Tarrant County.
Tuesday’s 3-2 party-line vote to approve the measure did not come without a fight.
For more than three hours, hundreds of protesters gathered outside a courthouse to decry voter disenfranchisement ahead of the upcoming November elections in one of the most politically important swing counties in Texas.
Tarrant County is home to more than two million people and includes the city of Fort Worth, a part of the state that could determine which party controls the Senate.
The cuts to polling locations will be substantial, from 316 sites used for the 2022 midterms to 224 — a nearly 30% decrease. County officials defended the reductions, arguing they would consolidate resources and prevent low-turnout sites.
“Republicans, Democrats, independents, anyone who’s going to vote, there will be plenty of places to vote by the time the process is over,” said Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare on an August episode of “Inside Texas Politics.”
The fight in Tarrant County comes amid an increasingly contentious atmosphere surrounding the midterms, fueled by President Donald Trump’s repeated claims of voter fraud and administration efforts to change how elections are conducted.
Democrats and election officials have raised alarms over the administration’s claims and are preparing to face potential legal challenges about the midterm election results.
Many of the protesters MS NOW spoke to outside the courthouse fear the cuts will disproportionately affect communities of color and lower socioeconomic status.
“The people least able to get to the polls, they’ve lost the most. It’s also the neighborhoods that are the most Black and brown — lost the most,” said Chris Tackett, a resident of Fort Worth.
Another protester who has been door-knocking across the county against the plan told MS NOW she has encountered multiple people who will have a more difficult time finding a polling location if the measure is passed.
“I literally just knocked on a door this weekend of a senior citizen who’s like, well, I don’t have a ride to the polls, right? We know that people need access to transportation,” said Nydia Cardenas, a resident and Democratic candidate for local office.
Last month, the Tarrant County commissioners delayed a vote on an initial proposal that would have reduced polling sites even further, to 176 locations. The delay followed dozens of testimonies from community members frustrated with the reduction, arguing the county — which has seen substantial population growth — should be adding polling sites, not cutting them.
During the August meeting, former Democratic state representative Lon Burnam, who spoke against the measure, was arrested, carried out of the courtroom and booked on a charge of disrupting a meeting after not complying with the judge’s order to set down a microphone.
Another Fort Worth resident who spoke at the meeting, EJ Carrion, was arrested a week after with the same charge as Burnam.
Tarrant County residents, from college students to retirees, signed up for Tuesday’s hearing, filling multiple overflow rooms and speaking for almost three hours. They included state Rep. Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic nominee for Texas lieutenant governor. She denounced the GOP commissioners’ plan, saying it “didn’t make sense.”
“If it looks like voter suppression, if it sounds like voter suppression, it is voter suppression,” Goodwin told the court, before encouraging voters to prioritize early voting.
Another Democratic candidate, Danny Minton, who is running to flip Texas’ 6th Congressional District, said the commission would join a “long line of villains in U.S. history” if they cut polling locations, calling the plan a civil rights violation. Minton’s sentiment was echoed by several speakers, including Billy Wilson, who accused the GOP members of the commission of “upholding white supremacy ideologies.”
In all, more than 85 speakers opposed the polling reductions. Only a handful spoke in favor of the plan, including local resident Jolyn Potenza, who argued the cuts were “based on facts, efficiency and responsible stewardship, not assumptions and political narratives.”
Several residents worried that the proposal would silence students at the University of Texas at Arlington, as the school’s polling site is marked to be removed. Rev. Ryon Price raised concerns about how the polling cuts would disproportionately affect communities of color within the county.
“Former generations were given poll tests and poll taxes. What we, the people of Tarrant County, are being given today is a poll takeaway,” Price said, invoking the disenfranchisement tactics of the Jim Crow era.
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