AUSTIN, TX—The Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted Tuesday to remove 92 polling places, cutting the county’s total from 316 to 224 in a move officials described as a bold expansion of voter convenience.
The party-line vote came 63 days before critical midterm elections. Two of the three Republican officials who approved the cuts, County Judge Tim O’Hare and Commissioner Manny Ramirez, are themselves on the November ballot. They said fewer polling sites would give residents more time to locate a ballot, drive farther, and enjoy the satisfaction of voting after a genuine struggle.
“We are not making it harder to vote,” O’Hare told a meeting packed with furious residents. “We are making it harder in a way that is orderly, tested, and consistent with the county’s interest in shorter lines at fewer doors.”
Under the new plan, each remaining site will serve thousands more registered voters. Officials called this an efficiency upgrade. They introduced a new “Polling Place Optimizer” that will direct voters to the closest open site, unless that site has also been cut for being too accessible.
The reductions arrived as the Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton moved from a solid Republican lead to a tossup. County officials said the timing was a coincidence that worked out very well for everyone involved. The Knuckle-Brained Fart Lozenge, the former president, did not attend the hearing, but his broader theory of election management was cited by supporters as a model for reducing turnout until the outcome feels safer.
“This hearing is not about the polls,” Ramirez added. “It is about making sure the polls do not get out of hand.” He said the county had studied lower-turnout jurisdictions and found that voters generally stayed home when they could not find a parking space, a ballot, or a reason to keep trying.
One speaker said the plan fell hardest on communities of color. Another asked if the county would replace the shuttered sites with a single truck that stops only in neighborhoods that vote the right way. A third stood and said, “Shame on you,” before sitting down in the same tone a person might use to order a sandwich.
This is the logic of people who believe democracy has a traffic problem and have decided to fix it by removing the roads.
The county’s voter guide will be available online, by mail, and through a telephone line that operates only when the remaining polling places are closed. It will include maps, a list of accepted IDs, and a reminder that voting is a right best enjoyed from a distance. Officials added that any resident unable to locate a polling site could call the county elections office and leave a message after the election had already ended.
