Voting Rights

Tarrant County's Republican Majority Votes Tuesday on Cutting 92 Polling Places. The County Judge Calls It a 'Sensible Plan.'

Texas' biggest swing county would go from 316 Election Day voting sites in 2022 to 224 this November. A civil rights coalition says many of the closures land in Black, Latino and Asian American neighborhoods.

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On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, the five members of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court will vote on how many places the county's voters get to vote.

The plan in front of them cuts 92 of the Election Day polling places the county used in 2022 — from 316 down to 224, almost a third gone, nine weeks before a midterm election.

Tarrant County contains Fort Worth. It is the largest genuinely competitive county in Texas: it went narrowly for Democrat Colin Allred against Ted Cruz in 2024, 401,742 votes to 399,927. If control of the U.S. Senate turns on Texas this November, it very likely turns partly on turnout here.

The court has a 3–2 Republican majority.

Where the closings land

Civil rights groups — the ACLU of Texas, the Legal Defense Fund and the Texas Civil Rights Project among them — wrote to the commissioners on Friday. Their objection was to the scale of the cut and to where it lands.

The closures "sweep across Tarrant County," they wrote, and many of the sites slated to close sit in areas with high shares of Black, Latino and Asian American voters — the examples the letter gives are south and southeast Fort Worth and central and eastern Arlington, which it describes as predominantly Black, Latino and Asian American communities. Cutting poll sites "especially at such a large scale, will harm Tarrant County voters and their right to participate in the democratic process," the letter said, "and cause particular harm to Black, Latino, and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters who already face significant barriers to exercising that fundamental right."

No independent analysis of this specific map has been published yet. There is one for the earlier, larger version the commissioners tabled in August, which would have closed nearly half the county's sites. Under that plan:

  • The lowest-income third of ZIP codes would have lost nearly 58 percent of their Election Day polling sites. The highest-income third would have lost just under 22 percent.
  • Majority-minority ZIP codes would have lost nearly 52 percent of their polling places. Majority-white ones would have lost about a third.

Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, made the point that the current proposal is being graded on a curve. "We should not compare this proposal to the worst proposal," she said. "We should compare it to the access that Tarrant County voters actually had in 2022." Of the plan on the table, she said: "Dropping 92 Election Day polling places is crazy."

County Judge Tim O'Hare, a Republican, has endorsed it. "As I've said from day one, no Tarrant County voter should ever feel they don't have enough time to vote," he said. "This is a sensible plan designed to ensure that, and I'm grateful to our elections staff for the work that brought us here."

The reason to be skeptical is Tarrant County's own record

Supporters describe the cuts as a matter of money and logistics, not politics. "We're clearly not trying to suppress the vote," state Rep. Matt Shaheen, who chairs the Texas House Elections Committee, told the Associated Press of polling-site reductions across Texas. "That's a silly accusation."

The trouble with that defense is that Tarrant County Republicans have said the quiet part out loud before, repeatedly, and recently.

That is the pattern this vote sits inside: fewer places to vote, and no county money to get anyone to the ones that are left.

And it sits inside a state pattern too

Texas has spent the past several years narrowing the ways its residents can cast a ballot.

After Trump's false claims that his 2020 loss was the product of fraud, the state passed new restrictions on mail-in voting that were later found to have significantly reduced turnout. Some of those provisions were struck down by a judge for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act — and then restored by the Fifth Circuit, in a state where more than 3 million voters have a disability.

This year Texas carried out an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting at Trump's request, redrawing the map to hand Republicans more U.S. House seats. That is the same playbook South Carolina's Sheri Biggs cheered when she endorsed erasing her state's only Democratic-held district — "I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values."

And at the federal level, Republicans continue to push the SAVE Act, a bill that could block tens of millions of eligible Americans from registering to vote.

Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who spoke against the closures alongside Simmons on Sunday, framed the local fight in national terms. "The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don't want us to be able to vote easily," he said.

The bottom line

On September 1, a Tarrant County Commissioners Court with a 3–2 Republican majority is set to vote on a map cutting 92 Election Day polling places — from 316 in 2022 to 224 this November — in the largest swing county in Texas, nine weeks before a midterm that could decide the U.S. Senate. The ACLU of Texas, the Legal Defense Fund and the Texas Civil Rights Project say many of the closures land in the county's Black, Latino and Asian American neighborhoods. The same county's Republicans ended the funding for free bus rides to the polls in early 2024, tried to close campus voting sites later that year, barred outside groups from registering voters in county buildings, and in 2025 cut polling places by more than a third. The county judge calls this one a "sensible plan."

Source

Talarico Protests as Texas Swing County Plans to Close 92 Polling Places — Stephen Prager, Common Dreams, August 31, 2026. Additional reporting from KERA News and the Fort Worth Report.

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