Officials in Tarrant County, the third most-populous in Texas, approved a plan to reduce the number of polling locations by 92 compared to the 2022 elections.
Page A11From§Eachthe early evening edition — 1 September 2026
Texas county slashes polling sites after outcry, citing turnout, then slashes them again, citing turnout
As it ran on the front
I want to read you something out of the notebook, if you'll bear with me — I had the page a minute ago... here it is. Tarrant County, Texas.
The county voted to cut polling sites ahead of the midterms. There was a public outcry — that's the coverage's word, not mine — and after the outcry, the county cut more sites. Both moves, the record shows, arrive wearing the same word, and the word is turnout. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett — she's from Texas, she said this on television, I wrote it down — says the state's GOP wants poll sites slashed because turnout runs high among Democrats. That's her charge, and I just carry the notebook. But the county's arithmetic is on the page either way: fewer places to vote, then a complaint, then fewer still.…
…(cont) Turnout. I keep coming back to the word.
I've got a dog. Old dog. Sleeps most of the day, wakes up for the mail carrier on principle. In August he drinks his water bowl down to the bottom by noon, and in all the years I've had him, it has not once occurred to anybody at my house to solve that by taking away the bowl. You get a bigger bowl. My neighbor with the three big dogs has three bowls lined up on the porch like a diner counter. That's the whole science of it, everywhere I've ever stood in a line: when the drinking goes up, the bowls go up. The bank sees a line and opens a window. The hardware store sees a line and opens a register. The crowd is the argument for another door, not the argument for boarding one up.
So Tarrant County is the first place in my notebook where the bowl works backwards. Turnout is high — that's the crowd at the water — and the county's answer is fewer bowls. People object, and the county reads the objection, and the answer is fewer still. I checked the pages twice, standing in the driveway in my raincoat — the dog wouldn't come out, he doesn't care for rain — and the pages read the same both times: one word, holding down two different jobs. Once as the reason to cut. Once as the reason to cut again, after the complaints about the cutting.
And I want to be fair; I'm always getting in trouble for being fair. Maybe there's an efficiency study somewhere. I didn't find one in my pile. I found a word. And when one word explains the cut, and then explains cutting deeper after the complaint about the cut, I start to wonder what the word is doing on the form. But that's me wondering, and wondering isn't in my job description. The notebook only holds what they said.
Oh — hang on, one more thing, I nearly forgot, and it's been bothering me all morning. If a high turnout is the reason a polling place has to go, then somewhere in the county's math there ought to be a number that runs the other way. So help me out, because I couldn't find it anywhere in the record: what turnout would be the reason to add one?
“They say they're cutting polling places because turnout is too high, then cut more when folks complain. When the lines get longer, the reason is always the voters, never the people making the map.”
“It's about efficient allocation of resources, obviously. When turnout is high, you have to manage the crowds, so sometimes you reduce polling places—not that I'm saying that's what happened, I mean, if people complain, isn't that proof the system works? Or maybe it means...wait, did I say that?”
The receipts
Local officials in Texas are voting on whether to cut the number of polling sites in the state's third-largest county. Officials say it would get rid of low-turnout sites, while Democrats argue it's voter suppression. Democratic Rep.
Officials in Tarrant County, Texas, voted to reduce polling locations in the county from 316 in the 2022 midterm elections to 224 for this year's elections.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.