For years, conservative litigants flocked to Judge Reed O’Connor’s district. Now, North Texas has become a favorite destination of the Justice Department.
Page A9From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
One Texas court and one Texas county now decide how America votes and legislates.
Let's just say the address out loud, because the wire keeps saying it in two different stories like it's two different places. One dateline: a major Texas county is drawing up a plan to cut its number of polling sites. Another dateline, same state: the Times reports that a huge share of the president's policy agenda — immigration, regulation, the whole stack — runs through one federal court in Texas. Not the circuit generally. One court. You want to know how a democracy gets small enough to fit in a filing cabinet, that's how — you shrink the number of places a person can vote, and you shrink the number of judges who get to decide what the vote was worth. Nobody's claiming these two offices coordinate over lunch. Nobody has to. The county doesn't need a memo from the courthouse to know that a shorter polling list means a shorter line of people who show up to hold anyone accountable, judges included. And the courthouse doesn't need a memo from the county to notice that a jurisdiction with fewer voters watching is a quieter place to file the kind of case that reroutes a national policy. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's just what happens when both jobs — deciding who gets counted and deciding what counts — sit in the same few-hundred-mile radius, staffed by people who answer to the same state government. Every state has courts. Every state has counties that manage polling places. Only one of them keeps showing up in the same week's headlines as the place where federal policy gets made, unmade, and remade before it ever reaches a court anyone voted to put there. You don't need a law degree to see the shape of it, you just need to read the dateline twice. Cut the lines at the polls, keep the docket short at the bench, and the county that used to be a place on a map turns into the room where it happens. Nobody in that room asked you in. Nobody in that room has to.
“Same state, same trick twice — cut the polling sites so fewer people vote, then run every national policy fight through one friendly courtroom so the vote barely mattered anyway. That's not a coincidence, that's a zip code doing the job of a Congress.”
“Reducing polling locations is a routine consolidation for efficiency, not a rights issue, and as for the court — judges are assigned in the normal course, that's how the system — well, case selection isn't the point, the point is efficiency, both times.”
The receipts
Plans in one of Texas’ largest counties to use dozens fewer polling location than previous years is drawing protests from Democrats who say the reductions could create confusion in the November midterm elections
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.