Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is pushing for one of Texas' most important swing counties to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling places before November's midterms. Amid public outcry, the Commissioners Court for Tarrant County—which contains Fort Worth and borders Dallas—plans to hold a vote on Tuesday on…
Page A3From§Eachthe early bird edition — 3 September 2026
Tarrant County commissioners vote to close the 92 polling sites Democrats warned about
As it ran on the front
Three days ago, Tarrant County had a plan on paper: shut 92 of the precincts that were open in 2022, cut a third of the map in a swing county that decides plenty even if not everything, and let public comment run its course before Tuesday's vote. James Talarico, running for Senate, spent those three days telling anyone who'd listen that the plan shouldn't become policy. Common Dreams reported the sites on the list sit disproportionately in the poorer and minority precincts of Fort Worth. ABC News called the whole thing a likely source of "confusion" heading into November. That was the warning, filed and dated, on the record before anyone cast a vote.
Then on Tuesday the Commissioners Court did what commissioners courts do with a plan: they voted on it. Not amended it, not tabled it for study, not folded it into some pilot program for 2027. They voted to close the 92 sites — the same 92, the same third of the county's 2022 map — and it passed.…
…(cont) Roderick Miles Jr., the Democratic commissioner who sat through that vote, called it a "modern-day poll tax." That's a precise term for a specific mechanism. A fee is one way to price somebody out of a ballot. A longer drive to a consolidated site works too, especially if you're paid by the hour and the site that used to be four blocks from your house isn't there anymore.
What's notable isn't that Republicans on a county commission wanted fewer polling places in a swing county three months before a midterm — that's the math you'd expect from the people who drew this plan. What's notable is how little distance there turned out to be between "plan" and "vote." A Senate candidate's warning, a report on which precincts would feel it worst, a wire story flagging "confusion" for the fall — none of it moved a single line on the agenda.
The record now reads plainly: a plan got announced, Democrats said what it would do, and Tuesday it did that. The 92 sites don't reopen because a candidate said "confusion" on the record first, and the county still has an election to run in November with a third fewer places to hold it. That's the whole sequence, start to finish, no twist in the middle — just a warning that turned out to be a description.
“This ain't complicated — you don't need a law degree to see a "plan" and a "vote" are two words for the same thing three days apart when the guys holding the gavel already know how they're voting. They call it consolidation, Miles called it a poll tax, and both of those are just different words for "we counted the votes we don't want and moved the building." The stakes here are the whole ballgame — that's a swing county, that's a Senate seat, and 92 fewer doors to walk through is how you win an election before anybody casts a vote in it.”
“Look, nobody's closing polling places, they're "consolidating resources" — that's just good government, you streamline, you save money, everybody wins. And sure, the sites happen to skew toward — okay, I didn't say that part out loud, forget I said that part. The Commissioners Court has every legal right to set its own election footprint, that's just federalism, that's just how counties work, and if turnout dips in certain precincts that's a turnout problem, not a — why do I sound like I'm reading off a spreadsheet of which zip codes to cut.”
The receipts
Roderick Miles Jr., a Democratic Tarrant County commissioner, called the closures a “modern-day poll tax.”
Senate candidate James Talarico is pushing Tarrant County to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling sites.
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.