According to MS NOW, Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines Tuesday to shrink the number of polling places available this November. The approved list falls from 316 sites used in the 2022 midterms to 224, a reduction of nearly 30 percent in Texas’s third-most populous county.
The decision came after a long public session. Hundreds of people stood outside a courthouse for more than three hours. The county includes Fort Worth and has more than two million residents. Coverage of the meeting described the area as a swing county that could affect which party controls the Senate.
Officials said the change would combine resources and close locations that draw few voters. Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare said on an August episode of “Inside Texas Politics,” “Republicans, Democrats, independents, anyone who’s going to vote, there will be plenty of places to vote by the time the process is over.”
Overflow rooms fill during nearly three hours of testimony on the polling cuts
Commissioners put off a vote last month on a steeper proposal that would have left 176 sites. Speakers at that session argued the county has grown and should add locations rather than take them away.
Former Democratic state representative Lon Burnam was arrested during the August meeting after he did not set down a microphone when ordered. Officers carried him from the courtroom, and he was booked for disrupting a meeting. Fort Worth resident EJ Carrion was arrested a week later on the same charge.
Tuesday’s hearing again drew a large crowd. College students, retirees, and other residents filled the main room and overflow spaces and spoke for almost three hours. More than 85 speakers opposed the reductions. Only a handful spoke in support.
State Rep. Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic nominee for Texas lieutenant governor, told the court the plan “didn’t make sense.” She said, “If it looks like voter suppression, if it sounds like voter suppression, it is voter suppression,” and encouraged people to use early voting. Such accusations of voter suppression have also been leveled by Texas lawmakers, though the linked story concerns a different allegation of voter fraud.
Democratic candidate Danny Minton, who is running in Texas’ 6th Congressional District, said the commission would join a “long line of villains in U.S. history” if it cut polling locations. He called the plan a civil rights violation. Billy Wilson accused the Republican commissioners of “upholding white supremacy ideologies.”
Fort Worth resident Chris Tackett said, “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.” These concerns about election administration are part of a national landscape of legal disputes, such as when a judge ruled the Trump administration’s voter citizenship database broke federal law.
Nydia Cardenas, a resident and Democratic candidate for local office, said she had been knocking on doors against the plan. She stated, “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.”
Jolyn Potenza was among the few who favored the measure. She argued the cuts were “based on facts, efficiency and responsible stewardship, not assumptions and political narratives.”
Residents also raised the planned removal of a polling site at the University of Texas at Arlington. Rev. Ryon Price said the reductions would hit communities of color hardest. He stated, “Former generations were given poll tests and poll taxes. What we, the people of Tarrant County, are being given today is a poll takeaway.”
Coverage of the hearing said the dispute is unfolding during a tense midterm period marked by President Donald Trump’s repeated claims of voter fraud and by administration efforts to change how elections are run. Democrats and election officials said they have raised alarms and are preparing for potential legal challenges over the results.
Published: Sep 2, 2026 11:45 am