92 Polling Places Fewer: Tarrant County Votes Tuesday on a Map Its Own Voters Are Still Arguing About
The Commissioners Court cut the map from 316 sites to 224. A judge declined to restore them. Now the NAACP is phone-banking the voters whose polling places disappeared, and Trinity Metro rides to the polls are free.
Tarrant County goes into Election Day with 224 places to vote — 92 fewer than the 316 it ran in the 2022 midterms — and with a community mobilization built specifically around that fact. The county's five-member Commissioners Court voted in September to cut the locations, the court's three Republicans backing the proposal and its two Democrats rejecting it. ABC News, reporting Monday morning, describes the decision as one that 'caused an uproar in the community,' and the argument has not cooled since: it has simply moved from the commissioners' courtroom to phone banks, bus routes and, still, a courtroom of the other kind.
The two sides' cases are both on the record. Commissioner Matt Krause, who voted for the cuts, told ABC News the number of locations complies with state law and ensures 'we don't have polling places clustered together so we're making efficient use of our polling sites,' and County Judge Tim O'Hare has said that 54 of the 224 locations exceeds the statutory minimum — the plan, in his statement, gives every voter 'a safe, accessible location with secure equipment' without 'the wasteful practice of placing polling sites directly across the street from one another.' Against that stands an ABC News data analysis from September: 21 ZIP codes with more than 75 percent non-white residents lost 37 polling sites — about 30 percent of the county accounting for 40 percent of its losses. In ZIP code 76010, Election Day places fell from eight to three with no replacements; in 76119, from nine to three. 'You've got families who've been voting at some of these locations that have been removed for decades,' Democratic Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. told ABC News. A judge has already weighed the timing, if not the merits: on October 13, Judge Patrick Gallagher of the 96th District Court declined to order the sites restored for this election, and the underlying discrimination lawsuit remains active after the votes are counted.
What Monday adds is the response on the ground. Estella Williams, who leads the Tarrant County–Fort Worth chapter of the NAACP, told ABC News her chapter has launched a phone-banking campaign calling and texting voters who previously voted at sites that have shut down, and has partnered with Trinity Metro to give residents without cars free roundtrip bus rides to the polls during early voting and on Election Day. 'Frustration is going to come about when those persons show up [at those closed polling sites],' Williams said. The stakes are why the fight is national news: Tarrant is the biggest county in Texas that Donald Trump won in 2024, with 51.86 percent, after Joe Biden carried it in 2020 — a swing county inside a state whose Senate race is competitive for the first time in a generation. Early voting, for all the argument, ran hot: officials reported first-week turnout up 63 percent over the first week of 2022, even as WFAA reported long lines. On Tuesday the reduced map gets its only real test — 224 locations, open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., for every Tarrant voter who has not yet cast a ballot.
