Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is pushing for one of Texas’ most important swing counties to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling places before November’s midterms.
Amid public outcry, the Commissioners Court for Tarrant County—which contains Fort Worth and borders Dallas—plans to hold a vote on Tuesday on whether to shutter 92 of the polling places used in the 2022 election, many of which serve the city’s poorer and minority populations.
If Democrats flip the Senate this November, the road to that outcome will almost certainly run through Texas. A Democrat has not won a statewide election there since 1994, but Talarico may be in a position to break the trend—leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in most polls.
Tarrant County narrowly supported then-Rep. Collin Allred, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024. Talarico said the closure of polling places was meant to suppress turnout and help Republicans cling to their advantage in the state.
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily,” Talarico said at a press event Sunday, during which he argued that the closures would result in longer travel for voters and lower turnout, especially in heavily Black and Latino communities.
“We’re here fighting for the rights of everybody,” Talarico added. “The problem is when we let voting rights become a partisan issue. That’s when we walk down a very dangerous path in this country.”
Proponents of the closures have described them as a way for the county to save money, rather than a political tactic.
“We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” state Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-66), the chairman of the Texas House Elections Committee, told the Associated Press. “That’s a silly accusation.”
But Republican officials in Tarrant County have, in the past, explicitly tied closures of certain voting locations to partisan aims. In 2024, Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove several early voting sites on college campuses, a move that the county’s GOP chairman said would have been “a serious win for Republicans in Tarrant County.”
In 2025’s off-year elections, Republicans voted 3-2 to reduce the number of polling locations by more than a third and cut funding for free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. The previous year, they introduced new rules blocking what they derided as “left-wing” groups from registering voters inside county buildings.
At the state level, meanwhile, Texas has carried out unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to hand more US House seats to Republicans at the behest of President Donald Trump. And following Trump’s false assertions that his loss in the 2020 election was marred by fraud, Texas introduced several new restrictions on mail-in voting that were found to have significantly reduced turnout.
Tuesday’s scheduled vote in Tarrant County comes after commissioners opted to table an earlier proposal that would have shuttered nearly half the county’s polling places.
An analysis of that plan showed that the lowest-income third of ZIP codes would lose nearly 58% of their Election Day polling sites, while the highest-income third would lose just under 22%. Majority-minority ZIP codes would have lost nearly 52% of their polling places, while majority-white ones would have lost just a third of theirs.
A similar analysis has not yet been conducted for the new proposal. But civil rights groups still argue that the proposal will disenfranchise many voters.
“Cutting the number of poll sites, especially at such a large scale, will harm Tarrant County voters and their right to participate in the democratic process—and cause particular harm to Black, Latino, and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters who already face significant barriers to exercising that fundamental right,” wrote groups including the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a letter to the Commissioners’ Court on Friday.
They emphasized that the polling places slated to close under the new proposal were clustered in areas such as south and southeast Fort Worth and central and eastern Arlington, which have predominantly nonwhite populations.
Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat who is running to unseat O’Hare as county judge and spoke alongside Talarico on Sunday, argued that while it was an improvement on the earlier proposal, “dropping 92 Election Day polling places is crazy.”
“We should not compare this proposal to the worst proposal,” she said. “We should compare it to the access that Tarrant County voters actually had in 2022.”
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