Voters line up at the Como Community Center on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, on the first day of early voting for the Nov. 5 general election.
Jamie Moore-Carrillo
jmoore-carrillo@star-telegram.com
The Tarrant County elections administrator proposed 224 potential Election Day and 47 early voting polling places for the Nov. 3 midterm, after commissioners delayed a vote on an earlier proposal that would have slashed the number of sites.
The newly proposed plan adds 48 additional Election Day polling locations to the previous proposal, including 12 in each commissioner’s precinct, and adds five additional early voting locations. The new plan exceeds the minimum Election Day polling locations by 54 sites, but is 92 fewer than in the 2022 midterm.
Commissioners are scheduled to consider the new plan during their Sept. 1 meeting. Early voting runs from Oct. 19-30.
“As I’ve said from day one, no Tarrant County voter should ever feel they don’t have enough time to vote. This is a sensible plan designed to ensure that, and I’m grateful to our elections staff for the work that brought us here,” County Judge Tim O’Hare said in a news release.
The latest version of the polling place plan follows a contentious August meeting about a proposal to reduce the number of Election Day voting locations for the November midterm from 316 in 2022 to 176 in 2026. Early voting sites would have been cut from 50 in 2022 to 42 in 2026.
The plan presented by Election Administrator Clint Ludwig received pushback from members of the public, as well as O’Hare and county commissioners, who unanimously agreed that the cuts were too drastic.
Commissioners delayed the decision on where to put voting locations and how many there should be until the Sept. 1 meeting.
The court’s three Republican members offered their hopes for the voting sites in the days after the meeting.
Precinct 4 Commissioner Manny Ramirez said he’d like the voting locations for 2026 to remain the same as they were in 2022, unless a site is unable to or doesn’t want to serve as a polling place. An effort should be made to “balance these locations in an equal number by precinct,” he said in an Aug. 7 statement.
O’Hare and Precinct 3 Commissioner Matt Krause have said there isn’t a perfect number of sites they have in mind. However, the county shouldn’t be paying for sites across the street from each other or where fewer than 20 people vote, they say.
The voting site with the lowest turnout in 2022 – Kingdom Manifers Church in southeast Fort Worth – saw 37 voters on Election Day.
Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat who is running against O’Hare for county judge, has sent out multiple campaign emails blaming Republicans on the court for the proposed cuts.
“Either Tim O’Hare KNEW a proposal to eliminate ALMOST HALF of our voting locations was moving forward and failed to put a stop to it,” read two of the emails sent out in the week-or-so after the August meeting. “OR, if you take him at his word, he did not know what was happening inside the very government he is supposed to lead. Neither explanation is acceptable.”
During the meeting, Ludwig said he did not run the proposed cuts by members of the court to get their opinion.
O’Hare has described Simmon’s claims as dishonest. The judge has also previously said he’s confident that everyone in the county will have somewhere to vote.
“It has never been easier to vote in the state of Texas than it is now, unless you are not a U.S. citizen,” O’Hare told the Star-Telegram in an earlier report. “Then that is very difficult to do here in Texas, as it should be.”
Staff writer Rachel Royster contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 9:47 AM.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Eleanor (Elly) Dearman is a Texas politics and government reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She’s based in Austin, covering the Legislature and its impact on North Texas. She grew up in Denton and has been a reporter for more than six years.
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