Texas Considers Reducing Polling Sites In Tarrant County [Op-Ed]

Boy, the Republican Party really doesn’t get down with the idea of free and fair elections. Officials in one of Texas’ biggest counties are considering a plan to reduce polling sites ahead of this fall’s midterms. 

AP reports that officials in Tarrant County will vote Tuesday on a proposal to eliminate several polling sites. Tarrant County is the third-largest county in Texas and is home to 2 million people. Texas has unexpectedly become a battleground state ahead of the midterms due to a tightly contested Senate race. 

It’s interesting that the proposed reduction comes as Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has consistently polled ahead of his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Talarico recently spoke out against the proposed polling site reduction during a recent news conference.

“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily,” Talarico said. Should the proposal pass, Tarrant County will have 92 fewer polling sites than it did during the 2022 midterms. 

The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union have also spoken out against the proposal. They joined several other voting rights groups in signing a letter urging the county to reject the proposal. They argue that the closures would be largely felt in areas with high percentages of Black and Hispanic workers. 

Unsurprisingly, several Republican officials in Texas have spoken in favor of the reductions. “We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” state Rep. Matt Shaheen, the Republican chairman of the House Elections Committee, said of the proposed reductions. “That’s a silly accusation.”

Really? Accusing the state legislature that has continually closed polling sites, engaged in a racist gerrymander, and has implemented strict restrictions on mail-in voting of suppressing the vote is silly? 

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, a Republican and the county’s top administrator, argued the proposed reduction would remove the risk of redundant polling sites. “All of this is accomplished without the wasteful practice of placing polling sites directly across the street from one another,” O’Hare said. 

Carol Raburn, who worked the March primaries as an election judge in Tarrant County, has called the effort a clear attempt to suppress the vote. “Because what happens when people don’t have a convenient place to go vote that’s not too far away from where they are, where they live? They just don’t go vote because they’ve made it so difficult,” she said.

Nationally, the GOP has made suppressing the vote one of their key issues ahead of the midterms. President Donald Trump has spent the last year trying to federalize control of elections and has drafted an executive order restricting mail-in voting. The United States Postal Service (USPS) drafted a rule in response to the executive order that orders postal workers not to deliver mail-in ballots in states that haven’t turned their mail-in voter list over to an online portal overseen by the USPS. 

While the Supreme Court initially lifted a block on the rule earlier last week because a coalition of Democratic attorneys general filed the lawsuit too early, a federal judge restored the block after the USPS officially implemented the rule. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. 

It’s hard to have faith in politicians when they’re so willing to suppress the vote to maintain power as opposed to passing legislation that actually improves the lives of the people that put them in power. 

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