- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud.
Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden.
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There will be one poling place for Dallas/Fort Worth. It will be San Antonio. It will be open from 10am to 3pm. Please bring three forms of identification. Mail in ballots will not be counted.
(/s)
I mean, you joke. But absurdist arbitrary forms of voter disenfranchisement are an age-old technique for shrinking voter participation.
William Rehnquist rode “bigotry at the voting both” all the way from schlub voter caging to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
I’m all right with in person, but give workers the time off to actually go vote.
But really, this is all fake and performative isn’t it? The whole point is to prevent the voting from happening.
Even if everyone is allowed to vote in 2026 or 2028, the result will end up being manipulated in favor of the Fascist GOP. The last time voting mattered was in 2024 and the orange fuckwit won, like he said - after he’s in the white house Americans won’t ever need to vote again…
It’s not voting when you only allow your people to vote. The consequences are dire though. Those people seldom die a peaceful death.
When fair voting for a leader ends, killings begin.If not for gerrymandering and id laws for registering to vote Texas would probably be majority Democrat.
Texas was majority Democrat back in the 90s.
But a big part of the Republican turn was White Flight. The converts included Phil Gramm, John Connally, Rick Perry, and John Cornyn. And the agency of that transition was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, a Connecticut transplant who took over the Harris County Republican Party in 1963. Great book on the subject - Family of Secrets, by Ross Baker - that gets into all the messy details of the Texas transition from Blue Dog Democrat to Saudi Republicanism.
The gerrymander of 2003 leveraged a slim majority in the legislature into a permanent majority of Safe Seat districts. But the bulwark of that gerrymander was the partisan nature of the state’s Oil & Gas Industry. Practically overnight, you had guys like Ross Perot and T. Boone Pickens forced to bend the knee to a new set of Wall Street backed financiers or risk losing their empires to the all powerful Texas Railroad Commission’s new owners.
The modern Texas Democratic Party is based in college aged professionals and service-sector minorities, mostly clustered in the big urban enclaves of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso. As soon as you get outside those dense, ethnically diverse cores, you end up in a vast rural wilderness where a handful of powerful landlords effectively control the state.
Beto O’Rourke was right in his initial prognosis - Texas wasn’t a Republican state, it was a non-voting state. But as Democrats have galvanized liberal voters in the cities, Republicans have found an enormous pool of disaffected and easily mobilized conservative voters in the exurbs and industry towns. Voter rolls swelled between 2008 and 2024, but Republicans met Democrats vote-for-vote with their GOTV efforts.
The idea that you could flip the whole state with just Harris County didn’t bare out in practice.
The ONLY way he can win is if he cheats. He’s a cheater. He’s cheating.
Fuck Texas.
Please, as a Texan, I ask you to consider that a great many of us are subjected to this bullshit and not happy about it. The gerrymandering, the poll closures, … these are reactionary responses to a population that is trying desperately to claw itself out of this mess.
As Californian who’s visiting Texas numerous times, your state can be pretty rad. It’s just the incessant politics and your fuckheaded leadership that blows. And the Evangelicals trying to impose their will on the rest of the country.
On the one hand I completely agree with you. On the other I know that Texas is a maga cesspool. We all know that not everyone in the state is conservative, but we also know that it’s a bastion for conservative leaning people. You might not like it, but do you actually think it will ever change?
I know that Texas is a maga cesspool. We all know that not everyone in the state is conservative, but we also know that it’s a bastion for conservative leaning people.
Except there’s actually more registered Democrats than Republicans in Texas.
It’s not that the population is overwhelmingly conservative. It’s that Texas is already one of if not THE worst state for gerrymandering and other election rigging by the corrupt state government.
This is what no one gets, we are a majority that has no voice thanks to a state that shows how you don’t lose power as long as you had it…
If we weren’t changing, they wouldn’t be panicking
You know how all those tech companies have been moving to Texas for all the low regulations and such? Yeah well turns out they need skilled professionals, who being educated tend to lean left.
Fascist scum. Taking away people’s right to vote? I hope there’s a second tree, God got it right on that one. 🌳
Back when I had expendable income, I used to donate to have oak saplings planted in Texas in Greg’s name. Hopefully one will grow up big and strong, and will finish the job.
