Texas county cuts over 100 polling sites as Trump attacks mail-in voting nationally

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Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after President Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud. Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who heads up the commissioners court, has also raised numerous questions about the security of local elections, helping to launch an electoral integrity unit in the county after he became judge in 2022. As of last summer, however, the unit had received fewer than 100 allegations of voter fraud. He and fellow Republican commissioners also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents.

“I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” O’Hare said at the time. And commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about what they said were left-leaning groups holding registration drives. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have previously written about O’Hare’s political influence in North Texas.)

On Tuesday, O’Hare voted with the two Republican commissioners on the court to reduce the number of polling sites in the county to 216, down from 331 in 2023. The decision also cut down the number of early voting sites.

County officials said the move was to save money, as they historically see low voter turnout in nonpresidential elections.

Throughout the meeting, O’Hare repeatedly emphasized that the cuts were intended to make the election more efficient. He argued that both the switch to county-wide voting in 2019, which allows voters to cast a ballot at any polling site in the county, and the expected low turnout made the cuts appropriate.

"I would venture to guess 99% of the public cannot name a single thing on (the 2025 ballot),” he said during the meeting.

Fewer voting sites means fewer voters, Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Report.

“If you move a polling place farther away from someone’s house, then they’re less likely to vote because you’ve increased the cost of voting,” said Rottinghaus, who has studied poll placement and its impact on turnout. “The cost can be your time. It can be your gas.”

The county’s move falls in line with a national trend that generally sees Republican-led states and localities “restrain and restrict” how voting operates — often in the name of discouraging illegal voting or, in Tarrant County’s recent case, cutting costs, Rottinghaus said. This could look like reducing voting locations or shortening early voting hours, he said.

Texas has led multiple efforts to make going to the polls more difficult, he said, such as making mail-in ballots harder to obtain and requiring photo IDs when casting a ballot.

No single law dramatically impacts voter turnout, Rottinghaus said, rather, it’s the collective of ever-changing policies that can discourage people from voting.

“The more you move around how voting occurs, like the hours and the locations, the harder it is for voters to understand exactly what they’re supposed to do and when,” he said. “A confused voter is usually a nonvoter.”

This is not the first time Tarrant County has been at the forefront of changing political headwinds. Earlier this summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw the county precincts; such changes usually happen after the decennial census rather than in the middle of the decade. O’Hare admitted the goal of the redrawn maps was to favor Republican candidates.

“This is about Republican versus Democrat, period,” O’Hare told Dallas television station WFAA ahead of the commissioners’ June 3 vote. “If it passes with one of the maps that I would want to see pass, it’s a very strong likelihood that we will have three Republicans on the Commissioners Court.”

In July, Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to the agenda of a special legislative session — a step he was apparently reluctant to take until he received a call from Trump to discuss the issue, the Tribune reported. The proposal has sparked a national fight over the redrawing of congressional maps. On Wednesday, the GOP-led Texas House took an initial vote adopting a new map designed to increase the number of Republican seats in the U.S. Congress.

Abbott has also fanned concerns about allegations of illegal voting, last year announcing the removal of more than 1 million ineligible voters from the state’s rolls, including more than 6,500 potential noncitizens. An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the number of alleged noncitizens the governor cited was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

Concerns about the cuts

More than three dozen speakers at Tuesday’s meeting denounced the move to cut polling sites and early voting locations, with some raising concerns that it amounted to the suppression of Black, Hispanic and college-age voters. Several speakers called the cuts a more extreme version of O’Hare’s failed effort to remove eight early voting locations at colleges last year. Only one person spoke in favor of the reductions.

Sabrina Ball, who opposed reducing the polling sites, said she has worked as an election judge in Republican Commissioner Manny Ramirez’s district in northwest Tarrant County. She said she’s seen firsthand people working hard to find the time to get to a polling location and vote.

“You’re not saving money. You’re sacrificing democracy to save a buck,” she said.

The two Democratic commissioners, Roderick Miles Jr. and Alisa Simmons, voted against the changes after unsuccessfully trying to delay the decision.

“Everybody deserves the right to have a place that they are comfortable with and familiar with to go and to cast their vote,” said Miles, who represents predominantly Black neighborhoods that saw a reduction in voting locations. He later added, “To dismantle or take those rights away from us that we worked hard to get is unacceptable at any level.”

Simmons said it was inappropriate to reduce voting locations as Tarrant County’s population grows. She pointed out that the Republican members of the Commissioners Court used that growth as a reason to redistrict the county’s precincts midcycle this year — a change that would significantly increase the chances of a GOP candidate defeating her in 2026.

A Texas law passed in May reduces the county’s minimum Election Day voting locations to 212 — rolling back a 2023 requirement of 347.

Tarrant County Election Administrator Clinton Ludwig said the sites meet the state’s new “bare minimum,” with “a little bit of wiggle room” in case certain planned locations fall through. He told commissioners that the initially proposed cuts aimed to save about $1 million.

He said he based the reductions on voter turnout in 2023, which saw about 12.5% registered voters cast ballots, he said. Locations’ accessibility and ability to securely store voting information were also considered, Ludwig said.

He said that no commissioner had any influence on the list and that no partisan analysis was taken into account.

Ludwig and O’Hare’s office did not immediately respond to requests to comment following the vote. O’Hare has also not responded to ProPublica and the Tribune’s previous reporting about him, declining multiple interview requests and refusing to answer questions, though a spokesperson sent the newsrooms a list of eight of his major accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

Rottinghaus said some counties “yo-yo” year to year in the number of polling places they have. Elections such as November’s typically have fewer locations than presidential and midterm ones, he said. Still, Tarrant County’s reduction seems “aggressive,” he said.

Once the number of polling places goes down, it usually stays down, Rottinghaus said.

“You’re going to generally see that same number continue for at least the near term,” he said.

Though he ultimately voted to reduce polling locations, Ramirez pushed back on the initial list of cuts to early voting sites, some of which he said were established and popular with voters. Ramirez said the county must balance access and efficiency. Commissioners then added back nine early voting locations. O’Hare was the lone vote against that move, saying some of those sites had historically low turnout.

“The formula for where you put these voting sites has to be scientific,” Ramirez told the Report ahead of the vote. “It should be population-based and proximity to additional site-based.”

Several Fort Worth City Council members urged their constituents to speak against the effort in the lead-up to the vote.

Council member Carlos Flores, who represents parts of northwest Fort Worth, issued a statement against the vote, saying fewer sites negatively impact diverse communities. In a statement to the Report, he added that limited polling locations and inconvenient voting procedures contribute to low turnout.

Mia Hall, who represents southwest Fort Worth, sent a news release to her district on Monday, decrying the proposed cuts in parts of her district that are predominantly Black or Hispanic.

“These communities have long fought for equitable access to the ballot box, and removing their polling locations is simply unacceptable,” Hall wrote. “While I understand the pressures of state regulations and budgetary constraints, disenfranchising entire communities is not an acceptable response.”

Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org.

Disclosure: The University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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