Tarrant County, Texas — home to Fort Worth and one of the largest swing counties in the country — will enter the November midterms with 92 fewer polling places than it had in 2022, after the county's Republican-majority Commissioners Court approved the cuts on a party-line vote Tuesday.

The plan trims the county from 316 polling sites in the last midterm cycle to 224, a roughly 30 percent reduction that will serve more than 1.3 million registered voters across a county of 2.2 million residents, according to NBC News. Early voting locations were also cut, from 50 sites to 47. The three Republicans on the five-member court — County Judge Tim O'Hare and Commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez — voted for the plan; Democratic Commissioners Alisa Simmons and Rodrick Miles Jr. voted against it, according to ABC News.

A courthouse fight over access

O'Hare defended the reduction as a matter of efficiency and security, arguing some sites saw only a trickle of voters in past elections. "Every voter deserves a safe, accessible location with secure equipment, and this plan does that," he said, adding that the new map averages 2.85 miles between early-voting sites and 1.56 miles between Election Day polling locations.

Commissioner Miles rejected that framing. "Our job isn't to calculate the fewest locations we can legally operate," he said. "It's to make sure every eligible resident has a fair opportunity to vote." Simmons was more pointed: "This is not about cost. This is about power. This is very political."

"The most powerful people in this county ... don't want us to be able to vote easily," said Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.

Voting-rights organizations including the NAACP and the ACLU of Texas warned during weeks of public hearings that the cuts would disproportionately burden Black, Hispanic and low-income voters, who research shows are more sensitive to longer travel times and lines at the polls. Demetria McCain of the Legal Defense Fund called the plan "a voter suppression tactic designed to impede Black voters." Tarrant County is roughly 40 percent white, 31 percent Hispanic and 19 percent Black, per county demographic data cited by Newsweek. The approved plan is itself a scaled-back version of an earlier proposal that would have eliminated 140 sites.

The fight carries outsized national stakes. Tarrant County, Texas's third-largest, has trended sharply purple: Donald Trump carried it by single digits in 2016, Joe Biden narrowly flipped it in 2020, and Democrat Colin Allred beat Ted Cruz there by fewer than 2,000 votes in 2024. It sits inside a state hosting one of the marquee U.S. Senate races of the midterms, where Talarico — the Democratic nominee — has held narrow leads over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in recent polling.

With the plan now adopted, county election officials will begin finalizing site assignments ahead of the November 3 general election, while voting-rights groups have signaled they are weighing further legal or legislative challenges to the reduced map.