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Democracy Docket: Top GOP Map-Drawer and Right-Wing Law Firm Team Up to Target Texas Minority Voters
Link: https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/top-gop-map-drawer-and-right-wing-law-firm-team-up-to-target-minority-voters-in-texas/
The Republicans who run one of Texas’ biggest counties have recruited the national GOP’s top map-drawer, as well as a leading Washington, D.C.-based anti-voting group, to ram through a new gerrymander that aims to expand their majority. The effort — finalized Tuesday in a 3-2 party-line vote by county leadership — has spurred furious opposition from local minority communities whose right to fair representation is at risk.
It underscores how the GOP’s sweeping national strategy to use map-drawing to boost the party’s power at the expense of non-white voters is now playing out at the local level. And, highlighting how the effort has leveraged some of the most powerful and well-connected figures in the conservative anti-democracy movement, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney who oversaw much of the redistricting process took over last month as the top voting lawyer at the U.S. Justice Department.
Voters in Tarrant County — Texas’s third-largest county, with a population of around 2.2 million, and home to Fort Worth — elect four commissioners who, along with the County Judge Tim O’Hare, make up the county’s five-member governing body, known as commissioners court. (In Texas, a county judge is not a judicial officer, but a regular elected official.)
Last year, O’Hare, a hyper-partisan Republican, tried to remove polling sites from college campuses. Now, he and the panel’s other two GOPers are out to flip one of the two seats held by Democrats to win a supermajority in the 2026 elections.
- more at link -
It underscores how the GOP’s sweeping national strategy to use map-drawing to boost the party’s power at the expense of non-white voters is now playing out at the local level. And, highlighting how the effort has leveraged some of the most powerful and well-connected figures in the conservative anti-democracy movement, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney who oversaw much of the redistricting process took over last month as the top voting lawyer at the U.S. Justice Department.
Voters in Tarrant County — Texas’s third-largest county, with a population of around 2.2 million, and home to Fort Worth — elect four commissioners who, along with the County Judge Tim O’Hare, make up the county’s five-member governing body, known as commissioners court. (In Texas, a county judge is not a judicial officer, but a regular elected official.)
Last year, O’Hare, a hyper-partisan Republican, tried to remove polling sites from college campuses. Now, he and the panel’s other two GOPers are out to flip one of the two seats held by Democrats to win a supermajority in the 2026 elections.
We knew the Repukes were doing it, but now they're not even bothering to hide their actions.
