Alexa Ura / The Texas Tribune

The first time former English professor Jarrod Stringer was told he couldn't vote in a Texas election, he sued. A federal appeals court tossed his case on a technicality, but one of the judges ended up admonishing state officials to not let it happen again.

Under the trio of crosses atop its sandy brick building, the McCabe Roberts Avenue United Methodist Church has a history of bringing people together.

Two churches founded at the turn of the 20th century — one with a mostly white congregation, one mostly black — merged to form the small sanctuary on Beaumont's east side. In the 25 years since that union, the church has established itself as a pillar of the community even as its numbers have dwindled.

With a population greater than that of 26 states, speaking more than 145 languages, Harris County can be a difficult place to make oneself heard. That’s especially true at the ballot box.

Houston resident Hyunja Norman has watched her fellow Koreans struggle to participate in a city where politics play out primarily in English and Spanish. 

Worried about the suppression of young voters in 2020, national and Texas Democrats are suing the state over a newly implemented election measure that’s triggered the shuttering of early voting places, including on college campuses, in various parts of the state.

When Crystal Mason got out of federal prison, she said, she “got out running.”

By Nov. 8, 2016, when she’d been out for months but was still on supervised release, she was working full-time at Santander Bank in downtown Dallas and enrolled in night classes at Ogle Beauty School, trying, she said, to show her children that a “bump in the road doesn’t determine your future.”

Navigating the streets to the U.S. Supreme Court on a Sunday morning, veteran civil rights attorney Jose Garza was anxious.

It was the spring of 2018, and in two days the high court would consider whether Texas lawmakers had drawn political maps that purposefully undermined the voting strength of their state’s people of color.

Barbara Canales’ family history is in some ways shaped by a deeply rooted understanding of bigotry and racism.

Her mother attended high school in Corpus Christi where the Mexican American students were segregated from their white peers; they were assigned separate gym lockers and even required to attend separate senior proms.

After losing his last chief election officer over a botched review of the state’s voter rolls, Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday appointed a new secretary of state: Ruth Ruggero Hughs.

Days after a white gunman murdered 22 people in El Paso in a shooting fueled by racism, Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday said that he will hold another series of roundtable discussions to consider legislative proposals to address the tragedy.

Just as they do every year, hundreds of county officials from all over Texas are packing a hotel ballroom in Austin this week for three days of all things elections.

On the agenda are a session on paying for primary elections and one on procedures for voting by mail. A half-hour is reserved for policy updates from the legislative session that wrapped up in late May.

Thousands of Texans’ votes were thrown out during the last presidential and midterm elections after they showed up to vote at the wrong polling location on Election Day.

The gap between Texas’ Hispanic and white populations continued to narrow last year when the state gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident.

When former Secretary of State David Whitley launched a review of the Texas voter rolls for supposed noncitizens, his office marked almost 100,000 voters for two reviews — one by county officials to question their voter eligibility and another by the Texas attorney general's office for possible criminal prosecution.

Three months after first questioning the citizenship status of almost 100,000 registered voters, the Texas secretary of state has agreed to end a review of the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens that was flawed from the start.

In a state where the population continues to rapidly swell, the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth region remains a fundamental source for those gains.

The U.S. House’s main investigative committee has opened an inquiry into the Texas secretary of state’s review of the voter rolls for supposed noncitizens.

Facing an uncertain path to confirmation after ordering a deeply flawed voter citizenship review that seemingly focused on naturalized citizens, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley is now apologizing to state lawmakers for the way his office rolled out the review — but he is still holding firm behind the overall effort.

State Rep. Rafael Anchia had been alarmed by the actions of the Texas secretary of state’s office for days by the time the agency’s chief, David Whitley, walked into the Dallas Democrat’s Capitol office on Monday.

After flagging tens of thousands of registered voters for citizenship reviews, the Texas secretary of state’s office is now telling counties that some of those voters don’t belong on the lists they sent out.

The state of Texas' announcement that it was flagging tens of thousands of registered voters for citizenship checks was met with dismay among civil rights attorneys and voting rights advocates, who said it echoed efforts around the country to remove eligible voters from the rolls.

The Texas secretary of state's office announced Friday it would send local election officials a list of 95,000 registered voters who the state says counties should consider checking to see whether they are U.S. citizens and, therefore, legally eligible to vote.

Just about any way you slice it, power at the Texas Capitol skews white and male. But when you look at the legislators appointed to wield the most power, the underrepresentation of people of color and women is even more marked.

In the latest about-face on voting rights under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice no longer supports efforts to force Texas back under federal oversight of its electoral map drawing.

Amid continued scrutiny over how lawmakers handle reports of sexual misconduct by their colleagues, members of the House on Wednesday approved a measure that will strengthen the way the chamber addresses complaints of sexual harassment.

In Karen Hill’s eyes, not much has changed since her father’s unsuccessful bid for Richardson Independent School District's board in 1963.

At the end of the 2011 legislative session, state Rep. Rafael Anchia, a Dallas Democrat, sat down to dinner with a Republican colleague from the Texas House. Anchia was exhausted and incensed.

By the end of Election Day, the political maps of the state’s suburban and swing counties had a peculiar blue tint.

Once a hub for refugees starting new lives and reuniting with their families, refugee resettlement efforts in Texas are now a shadow of what they once were.

Despite the grim, long-standing realities of income inequality in the state, 2017 proved to be a year of solid economic improvement for Texas with ongoing gains that are reflective of the state’s post-recession bounce. 

Before 45 days pass in the next legislative session, Texas lawmakers must begin fixing discriminatory issues with the way in which North Texas' House District 90 was drawn.