GOP backs down from suppression scheme in Texas after voter outrage

Republican officials were set to vote on a plan Tuesday to cut almost half of Election Day voting locations in a major Texas battleground county that has shifted blue in recent years. 

They also planned to cut eight early voting locations, some on college campuses. 

But that all changed at the last moment, when Republican officials were faced with a massive backlash from outraged voters who packed the meeting room — and two overflow rooms — to demand that their voting locations remain open. 

Voters blasted GOP officials for proposing a plan that would reduce Election Day polls from 316 locations in the 2022 midterms to just 176 locations this year. 

Tarrant County resident Harriet Harrell, one of the furious public speakers at Tuesday’s meeting, called the proposal “morally reprehensible.”

“Who made these decisions? What criteria were used? Why wasn’t there citizen input? What’s the impact on voters? Which sites were eliminated and why?” Harrell asked, highlighting the county’s complete lack of transparency about the cuts.  

Traditionally a safe GOP stronghold, Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, is the 14th largest county in the U.S., home to 2.2 million residents. It has become a high-stakes battleground as it increasingly votes for Democrats. Half of the county’s population is now Black and Latino, according to the Census.

Last year, the county also became the nation’s redistricting canary in the coal mine. Tarrant County Republicans hired Public Interest Legal Foundation, a national anti-voting law firm, to oversee a mid-decade gerrymander to dismantle one of two seats on the county governing body held by Democrats. They hired Adam Kincaid, the national GOP’s leading mapmaker, to draw the map. Tarrant County voters fought back, accusing Republicans of passing what amounted to a clear racial gerrymander. However, a federal court upheld the map.

State and national Republicans have good reason to focus on Tarrant County. Earlier this year, the Texas GOP was badly shaken when Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election to fill a state senate seat in Tarrant County.

Voters did not win the redistricting fight — at least, not outright. But a major plot twist could be in the works. Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons, whose district was targeted in the redraw, is now challenging County Judge Tim O’Hare (R) for his own job overseeing county government. And some early polling shows the two candidates are tied.

Simmons and O’Hare continued to spar Tuesday as the fight over cuts to voting locations boiled over into an unexpected ending, with Republicans agreeing to table the decision and add more polls.

O’Hare said Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig had “missed the mark a little bit” with the plan. But O’Hare also insisted that Ludwig was solely responsible for coming up with the massive proposed cuts — not any of the three Republican officials who serve on the county court.

“The idea that this is some conspiracy or something that people are doing…it’s utter and complete total nonsense,” O’Hare said. “You didn’t talk to me.”

Simmons went on to grill Ludwig about the plan.

“You got no community input, no party input, no nothing,” Simmons said. “As much as you want to call it whatever you’re calling it, this is a deliberate act to reduce voter access. And you haven’t given a good reason for it, because nobody on court, according to you, asked you to do it.”

Ultimately, Ludwig said he would come back to the next meeting with another proposal.