It’s been a very alarming couple of weeks for democracy. Whistleblowers at the United States Postal Service have warned that a faulty new system rushed into place by the Trump administration this summer is basically designed to reject millions of mail-in ballots this November.
Federal “monitors” sent to babysit Wyoming’s primary election (in what seems to be an early dry-run of Trump’s plans for the midterms) were so blatantly trying to meddle in the process that the state’s Republican governor called the DOJ agents “aggressive, irregular and disruptive.”
Texas suspended the voter registrations of 1.2 million people without notifying them, just two months before midterms, by flagging that they may no longer live at their current address. (Voters who live in the county can still vote on regular ballots by taking the extra step of declaring their residency when they vote; folks have until October 5 to update their registrations and can check their status on the Texas secretary of state’s website, at a county election office, or by mail!)
And now, a pivotal purple county in Texas—the state’s third most populous—has voted to slash 30% of its own polling places, cutting the number of locations from 316 to 224. The three Republican officials on the Tarrant County elections board voted for the change, and the two Democrats voted against it. The deleted polling places are, of course, at places like the campus of UT Austin, which is expected to heavily support Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico over Attorney General Ken Paxton. The move is designed to create long lines at polling places—there will be about 5,800 voters per location now—and increase the distances people have to travel from their homes or offices to cast a ballot.
Voters Tarrant County heavily protested the move, showing up at town halls to register their disgust. “Nothing you can do can stop us from removing you in November,” one resident told GOP officials yesterday.
Tarrant County voters are also not buying officials’ claims that the move was to “save money” rather than to suppress turnout. “I’d love to know what you all think our tax dollars are for,” a local woman said at the town hall meeting. “They are to serve us, and I can’t think of a better use of taxpayer money than to encourage and support the democratic process.”
Tarrant County is the one Republicans fear the most this year, because it broke for Joe Biden by .22% and is also quite gettable for Talarico. Trump’s approval rating is 13 points underwater in Texas—and hovering just over 30% nationwide, which is horrible—and Talarico and Paxton are currently neck and neck in the polls. Suspending a million voters and removing polling places from college campus could provide just the amount of election fuckery the GOP needs to pull this one out.
On the other hand, voters really don’t like to be disenfranchised. Texans are especially activated against AI data centers and flock cameras right now, and Paxton is a historically foul candidate who was impeached by his own colleagues for corruption, bribery, and abuse of public office. I suspect that the more word gets out that Republicans are openly cheating to defeat Talarico, the more any given UT Austin student will be willing to travel miles off campus and stand in hours-long lines to make sure and vote their asses out.