FROM VOTEBEAT
By Natalia Contreras
This article was originally published Aug. 6 by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.
The chaotic Aug. 4, public meeting over the number of voting sites in Tarrant County for the upcoming November election highlighted public distrust in election administration decisions and the people making them in the state’s most populous purple county, experts and voting rights advocates said.
Hundreds of people showed up at the Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting to oppose a proposal to significantly reduce the number of polling sites on Election Day, from 316 used in the 2022 midterm elections to 176.
At least one person, a former Democratic state representative, was arrested after Tim O’Hare, the county’s executive and a Republican, kicked everyone out of the chambers, saying that people clapping and speaking loudly were disruptive.
O’Hare also called multiple recesses during the meeting, prolonging it as people waited to speak.
Speaker after speaker described the effort to reduce the number of locations as the latest in a series of efforts by O’Hare and the majority-Republican commissioners’ court to make it harder for residents to vote, something commissioners said wasn’t true. O’Hare and Commissioner Manny Ramirez, also a Republican, are both on the ballot in November.
“People are suspicious. We don’t trust them to perform their duties in a way that is helping the voters or serving the voters of Tarrant County,” said Janet Mattern, president of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County. “We see them more as self-serving of themselves and trying to keep themselves in power.”
However, the commissioners —– both Republicans and Democrats — said at the meeting that they didn’t suggest the plan.
“The notion or the idea that this is some conspiracy … is utter and complete and total nonsense,” O’Hare, who did not respond to requests for comment, said.
The proposal came from Tarrant County’s elections administrator, Clint Ludwig, whose role is nonpartisan, and who said the reduction in locations was aimed at increasing efficiency and saving money, since the county now lets voters go to any polling location rather than a single assigned site. Ludwig, who didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, said at the meeting the proposal would let him eliminate some sites that serve very few people. “Instead of having two polling locations, now you can have one,” he said.
The commissioners court ultimately tabled the vote, telling Ludwig the number of voting sites he proposed was too low and to return after revising the proposal to include a larger number of sites.
Especially with critical U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races on the ballot in Texas this November, the political stakes are extraordinarily high in swing counties like Tarrant, and this week’s fracas over the number of voting sites shows how closely residents — and politicians — are monitoring election administration plans there.
Democratic lawmakers, state Rep. Vikki Goodwin , who is running for lieutenant governor, and state Sen. Nathan Johnson, who is running for Texas attorney general, hosted a rally Tuesday ahead of the meeting to speak against the county’s proposal to reduce the voting sites. After the commissioners court meeting, Goodwin sent out a fundraising email about it. “Tarrant is the third largest (and most competitive) county in Texas,” she wrote. “The GOP knows their days are numbered, so they decided holding power was worth more than your ballot.”
Some experts say what happened in Tarrant on Tuesday shows how politicized the environment has become in Texas, and why the role of nonpartisan election administrators is key.
But that faith in independent election administration “sometimes falls away when you have this hyperpartisan environment where people aren’t sure if they can trust that the elections are going to be fairly run if it’s run by a party that is in power and is on the other side of that voter’s preferences,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
Tarrant County officials have been accused of partisan motives for election administration decisions
One by one over six hours on Tuesday, people went up to the microphone, many addressing O’Hare directly.
“You could be honest. You could just go ahead and say that you are closing these election polling locations because you don’t want people to vote. It’s not about saving money,” one resident said.
Others carried signs that read “We will vote u out!”
This was the latest in a series of controversial election administration issues in Tarrant. In 2024, O’Hare unsuccessfully pushed to close polling locations on college campuses, again drawing allegations of partisanship. That same year, O’Hare and the three other Republican commissioners on the court also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents.
Last summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw county precinct lines midcycle, a rare move that followed state Republicans’ choice to also redraw congressional district lines mid-decade. O’Hare said the goal of the redrawn precinct maps was to benefit Republican candidates. And in the fall, the court also voted along party lines to reduce the number of available polling locations.
“The decisions the commissioners have made over the past two years have really eroded that sense of trust from the community,” said Nina Oishi, a voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. Oishi also raised concerns about the way the commissioners court has handled public meetings, such as restricting people’s speaking time to one minute, kicking people out of the chambers, and arrests.
“They are the residents. They are supposed to be the ones getting to make their voices heard, and it just never feels that way there.”
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
