After tabling the plan in August, commissioners returned in September and cut 92 Election Day voting sites two months before the midterms
FORT WORTH, TEXAS — Tarrant County commissioners voted today to eliminate 92 Election Day polling locations, leaving nearly two million people in Texas’s third-largest county with fewer places to cast a ballot than they had in the 2022 midterms.
Closing polling places makes voting harder for every Tarrant County resident who uses one, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, across every racial line. The vote follows a March primary in which Texas Democrats set a midterm turnout record, casting roughly 2.1 million ballots statewide against 1.1 million in 2022, with Tarrant County producing the state’s fourth-largest Democratic primary vote.
In August, Democratic Attorney General nominee Nathan Johnson rallied with Tarrant County advocates against a version of the plan and warned that the decision will suppress lawful Texas voters, not anything else.
State Senator Nathan Johnson, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General, released the following statement:
“Tarrant County residents told this Court exactly what they thought of this plan in August. The Court waited a month and then massively cut locations anyway. Every commissioner who voted yes today knew what the public position was, and every one of them decided it did not matter.
“We have not heard a remotely convincing argument that this reduction of polling locations serves any purpose other than to make it more difficult to vote. While County officials say this saves resources, to close polling places seven weeks out from a midterm election, in the county where voter participation is surging, does not read as a budget decision.”
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