Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 to cut 92 polling locations ahead of 2026 midterms

On September 1, 2026, the Republican majority of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court -- County Judge Tim O'Hare and Commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez -- voted 3-2 along party lines to adopt a list of polling sites for the November 2026 election that cuts 92 Election Day locations compared with the 2022 midterms, reducing the county's sites from 316 to 224 and early-voting sites from 50 to 47. Democratic Commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr. voted against the plan after more than 100 speakers, most of them opposed, testified during an eight-hour meeting at the county courthouse in Fort Worth.

Texas law lets counties set their own polling-site totals, and county elections administrator Clint Ludwig, who proposed the reduced list, said several 2022 sites were no longer available or did not meet accessibility or security requirements. Miles and Simmons proposed several amendments to restore sites, but the Republican majority rejected each one; Krause called demands to match the 2022 total "arbitrary," and O'Hare said the new plan still leaves 54 of the retained sites above the state's mandatory minimum.

The NAACP, the ACLU of Texas and other civil-rights groups said in a letter that the cuts would fall hardest on majority-minority precincts in Fort Worth and Arlington. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, running for U.S. Senate against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, told reporters the reductions would mean "longer commutes, longer lines and lower voter turnout, especially in our Black and brown communities." The vote followed the same Commissioners Court's decision to cut nearly half the county's early-voting locations ahead of the 2025 election, and came a month after O'Hare cleared the same chambers and had a longtime critic arrested during a contentious August 4, 2026 hearing on an earlier version of this plan.