O'Hare's Not Done Yet

The GOP is scared of losing Tarrant County, so they're making it harder to vote them out.

Republicans across Texas are scared, and in no place are they scared more than in Tarrant County. Tarrant County commissioners meet tomorrow, August 4, at 10 am to vote on this year’s polling site list. The Republicans plan on cutting Election Day sites from 316 down to 176. That’s a 45% cut. Early voting sites go from 50 to 42.

Judge Tim O’Hare admitted, last year, to racist gerrymandering, to keep Republicans in charge. This latest move by the majority-Republican court in Tarrant County, is more of the same abuse they’ve inflicted on the community since taking office.

This is happening in a county with more than 1.3 million registered voters, on a ballot with more than 70 partisan races plus nonpartisan Tarrant Appraisal District and Keller ISD seats, in a midterm year where Democrats are running their broadest slate in decades. Fort Worth Report has the full list, and it's worth reading in full, because the list of what's getting cut tells you everything about who this is aimed at (spoiler: it’s Black and brown voters).

What’s actually getting cut.

Look at the names on the list of sites going away this year. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Tarrant County College South Campus. The Maverick Activities Center at UT Arlington. Southside Community Center. Forest Hill Civic and Convention Center. Everman Civic Center.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and TCC South were on the chopping block back in September 2024 too, when O’Hare tried to sneak a vote through while Commissioners Simmons and Brooks were in Washington for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference. Community members packed that hearing for four hours and won. UTA, TCC and the Seminary stayed on the map.

They’re back on the cut list. And this time the county’s got a new excuse. A state requirement that voting equipment be stored in a locked room, which the Maverick Activities Center apparently can’t meet. A technical requirement that just happens to knock out a polling site inside one of the most diverse student populations in North Texas, two years after community testimony saved it the first time.

It’s the same pattern, with these people, over and over again.

Last August, Republican commissioners voted to cut more than 100 Election Day sites for the November 2025 constitutional amendment election. They said it was about cost, because odd-year turnout is low. Tarrant still turned out over 223,000 ballots, one of its largest odd-year turnouts in over a decade.

Now it’s a midterm year, with a governor’s race, a U.S. Senate race, and the county’s own Judge and two Commissioners’ seats on the ballot, and the excuse has shifted from “turnout will be low” to “we need locked rooms.” The justification changes. The list of what disappears looks the same. Sites clustered in Black and brown neighborhoods, sites near colleges, sites in the parts of the county that just delivered Taylor Rehmet a 13-point win in a district Republicans held for 30 years.

Here’s the thing about Tim O’Hare. He does not have a polling-site problem. He has a pattern, and the pattern is as old as America, herself.

Tarrant County's White Supremacy Problem

Before Tarrant, O’Hare was mayor of Farmers Branch, where he spent his term trying to run Latino residents out of town. It cost that city millions in legal fees when the courts told him he couldn’t do that. He took that same energy to Southlake, where he led the charge against Critical Race Theory in a fight that made national news. As soon as he became judge, he led the push to defund Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, a program that serves Black and Hispanic girls. He’s taken money from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an organization with documented ties to Nazis, and he has never denounced it.

Then there’s Alisa Simmons. In April of 2025, in open court, O’Hare told the only Black woman on the Commissioners Court to “sit down and be quiet.” Then he told her she lacked “a semblance of class.” A few months later, his Republican majority redrew her precinct to erase the seat entirely. She’s now the one running to take his job in November, which should tell you how well that plan is working out for him.

So no, this isn’t a story about locked rooms. It’s the same guy, running the same play he’s run since Farmers Branch. Find the non-white communities that threaten his hold on power, and make it harder for them to show up. Girls Inc. lost its funding. Simmons was drawn out of her seat. Now it’s TCC South and the Maverick Activities Center’s turn.

Redistricting one year, budget cuts the next, locked-room requirements this year. It’s an unmistakable pattern.

The White Overlord Playbook: A Modern Racist Agenda In Tarrant County

Why are Republicans in Tarrant County panicing?

This is the year, Tarant County Democrats are finally going to take the local government back. Republicans knew that, so they racially gerrymandered the Commissioner’s Court. But internal polling is looking so bad for Republicans that they have to pull out all of the stops.

• Alisa Simmons is running to unseat O’Hare himself.

• Nydia Cárdenas is running against Manny Ramirez in Precinct 4.

• Jared Williams is running against Tony Tinderholt for Simmons’ old Precinct 2 seat, the one Republicans redrew specifically to make it harder for a Democrat to hold.

• HD94 and HD96 are flip targets.

• SD09, the seat Rehmet just won in a special election landslide, is on the ballot for a full term.

Republicans aren’t favored to win any one of those seats and they are freaking out. They know, so goes Tarrant County, so goes Texas. A party that was confident wouldn’t have needed a mid-decade redraw. And it sure as hell wouldn’t be spending the summer before a midterm cutting 140 polling sites instead of making a case for reelection.

This is the behavior of a party that's already counted the votes and doesn't like what it found.

How Important Is Tarrant County In The 2026 Election?

What happens tomorrow?

Commissioners vote at 10 am Tuesday at the Tarrant County Administration Building in Fort Worth. The agenda is here. In 2024, it took 160 people testifying for four hours to save these same sites once. It worked. Two Republicans crossed the aisle that day because the room made it too expensive politically not to. If you haven’t already registered to speak, they won’t let you tomorrow.

That’s the only lever that’s ever worked on this court. Showing up, in person, in numbers big enough that the vote becomes uncomfortable to cast.

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