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
Page A18From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Texas cuts polling sites while its one federal court decides the President's national agenda
As it ran on the front
Here's a trick you can only pull once you already run the table: you don't need to steal an election if you can just thin out who's allowed to show up to it, and you don't need to win in court if you can just pick which court hears the case. Texas is doing both this week, in public, in two separate stories that nobody's bothering to connect because they ran in different sections.
Story one: a major Texas county is planning to cut the number of polling sites. Doesn't need a motive attached, doesn't need anybody quoted saying the quiet part — you cut sites, lines get longer, some people who'd have voted don't, and it's always the people with the least slack in their schedule who lose that math, the hourly workers, the parents doing pickup, the guy who can't leave the floor for two hours to stand in a line that used to take twenty minutes.…
…(cont) Story two, same state: the President's entire national policy agenda keeps landing in front of the same handful of federal judges in Texas, because that's where the cases get filed, because that's where the odds are good. One newspaper laid out the whole map: how a single courthouse ends up deciding questions that used to take an act of Congress or a Supreme Court term. That's not an accident of geography. Federal law lets you file where the harm allegedly occurred or where a party resides, and if you're the party filing, you get to pick.
So put the two stories next to each other and you get the actual headline: the same state where it's getting harder to vote is the same state where it's easiest to get the outcome you want without a vote at all. Nobody had to break a law to build that; they just had to notice which levers were unguarded and lean on both of them at once. The guy at the end of the bar doesn't feel a judge's ruling in his checkbook right away. He feels it about eighteen months later, when the rule that got written into his paycheck, his healthcare, his kid's school lunch program, turns out to have been decided by one judge in one small Texas courthouse he's never heard of, because the fight got filed there on purpose.
“One state, two moves: shrink the polls in a county, and route every fight over the President's agenda through the one federal court there that keeps ruling their way. That's not a coincidence, that's just where you'd put both levers if you wanted the outcome no matter who shows up to vote.”
“Local election administrators cut polling locations all the time for budgetary reasons, and separately, judge shopping is a term used by people who lose in court. I'm not saying we picked that courthouse on purpose — I mean, someone picked it on purpose, but that's called venue, not — that's called venue.”
The receipts
For years, conservative litigants flocked to Judge Reed O’Connor’s district. Now, North Texas has become a favorite destination of the Justice Department.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.