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 B2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
Texas moves to cut polling sites as one federal court decides the fate of Trump's entire agenda
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The multiplicity of venues, wherever they were, aged and quiet, passed this week in Texas.
Born sometime around 1789, in the belief that no single body should decide everything and no single line should decide who gets a say, the multiplicity of venues had, by the time of its passing, already been trimmed down for years. It is survived by one federal court, which now finds itself the through-line for the entire domestic policy agenda of a sitting president, a distinction it did not apply for and cannot decline. It is also survived by whatever polling sites remain standing in one Texas county, after a plan to reduce their number moved forward, a plan whose beneficiaries are, as ever, whoever finds fewer places easier to manage than more.…
…(cont) It was preceded in death by the assumption that if you didn't like a ruling, there were other courts, and by the assumption that if the line was too long at one polling place, there was a second one down the street. Those went quietly, a few years back, and nobody sent flowers then either.
The multiplicity of venues was not a flashy institution. It did not hold press conferences. It just meant that power had to travel through more than one door to get anywhere, and that if a whippersnapper in Washington wanted to reshape a country's laws, he had to find more than one judge willing to say yes, and if a citizen in Texas wanted to vote, she had to find more than one place open on a Tuesday. That is bunk now, or it is heading there — one door, one line, and the wait is getting longer on both.
This is not, strictly, a story about a man in a robe or a clerk with a ledger. It is a story about how many doors a country keeps open, and this week Texas has fewer of both kinds than it used to. That is not a conspiracy. It is a floor plan, and floor plans are shit to redraw once the walls are already up.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you find out how many polling places are within a twenty-minute walk of your house, and whether that number went up or down this year.
“One judge runs the whole Trump docket, and the same state is quietly shaving polling sites off the list — that's not two stories, that's one machine tuning itself. Fewer doors to sue through, fewer doors to vote through, same zip code.”
“The court assignment is simply how the caseload fell — cases get filed where they get filed, and any given district can end up hearing a lot of related matters. As for the polling sites, that's a county-level efficiency decision, unrelated, entirely — did I say unrelated? They're in the same state. Fine. Unrelated but adjacent.”
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.