Racist Texas County Judge engineering mid-decade redistricting to decimate minority voting strength.
Unless you live in North Texas, you may not know about the blatant effort underway to destroy minority voting strength in Tarrant County – the third largest county in Texas, with over two million residents, including the large urban cities of Fort Worth and Arlington. But wherever you live, there is reason to be alarmed.
The 2020 U.S. Census revealed that Tarrant County has a majority-minority population, with Blacks and Hispanics increasing by over 220,000 and the Anglo population shrinking by over 32,000. That trend has likely accelerated since the census was released, and the demographic change is revealed in election results.
Over the last several elections, Tarrant evolved from a ruby red county controlled by Anglo voters to a purple county where, due to increasing minority voting strength, top-of-the-ballot Democrats like Joe Biden in 2020 and Colin Allred in 2024 carried the county. Even in down-ballot countywide races, Republicans have only won narrowly. Current MAGA extremist County Judge Tim O’Hare won with less than 53 percent.
Most importantly, Tarrant Commissioner Precinct 2 evolved from an Anglo-controlled district into one where minority voters have elected their candidate of choice two elections in a row – most recently popular African American Commissioner Alisa Simmons. Her election, along with that of African American Roderick Miles in Precinct 1 in 2024, affirmed that two of the four Tarrant commissioner precincts are controlled by minority voters.
The presence of two African American leaders elected to the Commissioners Court as the choice of minority voters is more than MAGA Judge Tim O’Hare can bare. O’Hare has a long history of hostility to minority voters. Before immigrating to Tarrant County from Dallas, O’Hare served as a small suburban city mayor where he engaged in such overt discrimination against Hispanic residents that a federal court ordered the city to pay over $6 million in penalties and legal fees. When running for Tarrant County Judge, O’Hare boasted, “If you’re a Republican officeholder and you haven’t been called a racist, then you probably haven’t done a thing.”
Well, O’Hare is doing plenty to be called a racist now. He is engineering a mid-decade redistricting of the Tarrant Commissioners Court Precincts designed to destroy the voting strength of Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. He hired the notorious election-denying, anti-voting rights legal group, Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), to shepherd and justify his attack on minority citizens.
Under the PILF-recommended maps, Black and Hispanic citizens are cracked out of Alisa Simmons’ Precinct 2 and packed into Commissioner Miles’ Precinct 1. The population in Simmons’ precinct is replaced with mostly Anglos from far-away neighborhoods – even the aptly named small City of White Settlement – to destroy the voting strength of its current minority population. In Miles’ precinct, all minority citizens see their voting strength diluted while historic neighborhoods, public facilities, a major university, and even downtown Fort Worth are removed.
The entire effort is being crammed down the throats of Tarrant minority citizens over a six- week period. Only four public hearings are being held in a county of over two million people. Key demographic and racial data for the alternative map is being withheld. Neither O’Hare nor any PILF representative will respond to legitimate inquiries from Commissioner Simmons, Commissioner Miles, or the public.
O’Hare and his MAGA allies dishonestly justify their actions by saying a redistricting process was not conducted in 2021 – a lie that has been conclusively refuted.
Public reaction against O’Hare’s racist redraw is overwhelming. In the limited public hearings, those against a new map outnumber those for it by more than 5 to 1. They see it for what it is – intentional racial discrimination playing out in real time.
Of course, Tim O’Hare doesn’t care. He wears the MAGA extremist brand and his earned reputation for hostility to minority citizens with pride. But his brazen racial discrimination could be key to protecting the voting rights he is attacking.
While basic voting rights have been weakened in many ways in recent years, intentional racial discrimination is still illegal under the Voting Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Commissioner Simmons, Commissioner Miles, and the citizens of Tarrant County are mounting a ferocious fight and building a record for a strong legal challenge to the discriminatory redraw.
This battle against intentional racial discrimination in Tarrant County is important to all of us. Its ultimate fate in the courts could determine if the most extreme attacks on minority voting rights can be stopped or if our nation has truly turned the clock back more than 70 years.
