A group of Tarrant County residents have filed a federal lawsuit over the county’s new commissioners court precinct map, accusing the county of disenfranchising Black and Latino voters.
Commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines to adopt the new map Tuesday. It largely reshapes precincts 1 and 2, which are represented by Democrats. The court’s Republican majority has openly said the goal was to create another Republican precinct, and the new map does just that — redrawing Precinct 2 with more Republican voters.
Throughout the redistricting process, opponents have accused Republicans of racial gerrymandering. They said the new map — called Map 7 in the lawsuit — takes voters of color out of Precinct 2 and packs them into Precinct 1.
The Lone Star Project, a Democratic political action committee, shared the lawsuit in an emailed news release. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas confirmed the lawsuit had been filed.
“Map 7 surgically moves minority voters from District 2 to District 1 while just as carefully moving Anglo voters from District 1 to District 2,” the lawsuit states. “The resulting map —in a county in which the majority of residents are non-Anglo — has three Anglo-majority precincts and one majority-minority precinct."
Republican commissioners have denied redistricting has anything to do with race. People who dislike the way maps are drawn use race as a tool to try to get them thrown out, Commissioner Matt Krause said at a public hearing in Hurst in May.
“The Supreme Court's not gonna step in if it's a partisan gerrymander,” he said. “That's why you have to allege that racial component, because that's the only way you can ever get into court to find relief, whether there's any basis to it at all."
The new map is discriminatory, the lawsuit's lead attorney, Chad Dunn, said in the Lone Star Project press release.
“Intentional discrimination is still against the law. The map they drew, the process they used to draw it, and the animosity shown to the citizens of Tarrant County violate the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution,” he said.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. Tarrant County, the commissioners court and County Judge Tim O’Hare are listed as defendants.
Tarrant County does not comment on pending litigation, a spokesperson said over email. KERA News has reached out to O'Hare for comment and will update this story with any response.
The plaintiffs — or the people bringing the lawsuit — are a group of Black and Latino Tarrant County voters who are either being moved to other precincts under the new map, or whose precinct will become majority white, according to the lawsuit.
Democratic commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr. asked the UCLA Voting Rights Project to analyze the proposed redistricting maps, according to the lawsuit. That analysis, by UCLA data scientist Michael Rios, determined the maps “are drawn based on racial characteristics and all proposed maps overly concentrate (pack) Black and Hispanic residents into a single district.”
Simmons represents Precinct 2. She's running for reelection next year, and she faces a tougher fight under the new maps. Retiring State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, announced he’d run for her seat after commissioners voted on the new map Tuesday.
The lawsuit also argues the new map disenfranchises 150,000 people by putting off their ability to vote for a commissioner.
The whole commissioners court doesn’t go up for reelection at once. Simmons, O’Hare and Commissioner Manny Ramirez are up for reelection next year, while Miles and Krause wait until 2028.
That means people moved from Simmons' or Ramirez’s precinct to Miles’ or Krause’s will have to wait a total of six years to vote for their commissioner, not the normal four, according to the lawsuit.
That’s allowed during normal redistricting processes, but “this consequence is insufficiently supported by a sufficiently weighty government interest when undertaken mid-decade, with a map within population deviation, and done so with race as predominate purpose,” the lawsuit argues.
Tarrant County’s mid-decade map redraw was unusual. Redistricting usually happens after the U.S. Census every 10 years, to make sure political districts are balanced by population.
Both parties use redistricting to solidify their power. Democratic commissioners in Dallas and Harris counties drew favorable maps for themselves in 2021.
About 150 people spoke at Tuesday’s Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting, most of them urging commissioners not to redistrict. O’Hare accused them of hypocrisy.
“I doubt there’s a single person in this room who came today to speak against redistricting that did the same thing in Dallas County,” he said. “I bet they didn’t.”
Race can be considered in mapmaking, but it can’t be the only consideration, according to experts. In 2018, a federal court in San Antonio ordered Texas lawmakers to redraw Fort Worth’s Texas House District 90, after the Supreme Court agreed it was redrawn using race to help Democratic incumbent Lon Burnam, according to The Dallas Morning News.
The court in San Antonio had previously ruled that Tarrant County’s House District 93 – then represented by Republican Tarrant County Commissioner Matt Krause – had been redrawn in a discriminatory way. The Supreme Court threw out that decision in a 5-4 ruling.
This month, a panel of judges in El Paso is hearing challenges to several districts that were redrawn in 2021, including allegations of anti-Latino discrimination in congressional and State Senate districts in Dallas and Tarrant counties.
This story has been updated.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org.
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