The Tarrant County Sub-Courthouse in Arlington is the closest voting site to UTA. The Maverick Activities Center will not be a polling location for the Nov. 3 midterm election.
File photo / Maricela Gonzales
Despite legal efforts, Tarrant County will have fewer voting sites for the Nov. 3 election than in the 2022 midterm election.
On Tuesday, a Tarrant County district judge denied a request to reinstate 92 voting sites — including the Maverick Activities Center — for the midterm election that were removed by a vote during a Sept. 1 Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting.
The closest voting site to UTA now is the Tarrant County Sub-Courthouse in Arlington, which is approximately a three-minute drive and an 18-minute walk from campus, according to Google Maps.
The lawsuit comes almost a month after the Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 to cut the number of early voting sites. This reduced the number of sites in Arlington from 59 to 37 for Election Day and from seven to six for early voting.
Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez, who are all Republican, voted to cut the sites. Democratic commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles voted against the proposal.
Deborah Peoples, Fort Worth City Council member; former judge Maryellen Hicks; Kathleen Hicks, former Fort Worth council member; and Camille Rodriguez, Fort Worth ISD trustee, filed the lawsuit against Tarrant County, the elections administrator and the Republican commissioners.
The four women claim in the lawsuit that the voting site reductions disproportionately burden Black and Hispanic voters.
After hours of testimony from elections administrator Clinton Ludwig, the four plaintiffs and others, District Judge Patrick Gallagher denied the request for an injunction that would restore the polling sites for this election.
The lawsuit claims that 46 polling locations removed from the approved list directly conflict with the county’s methodology, which states that locations where more than 500 votes were cast on Election Day will be placed on the keep list, according to previous Shorthorn reporting.
The adopted plan eliminates all polling locations in ZIP code 76103. During the 2022 midterm, 892 votes were cast in the ZIP code, according to the lawsuit.
Republican commissioners have called the move to reduce sites a cost-saving measure. During the Sept. 1 commissioners meeting, O’Hare said that during the most recent general election, multiple polling locations were empty, according to previous Shorthorn reporting.
Despite the court’s decision to deny the temporary injunction, the lawsuit is still active.
Jason Smith, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said that means the case would go through the full proceedings of a lawsuit.
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