After County Judge Tim O’Hare and his fellow Republican commissioners recently approved a new voting map that neuters the voices of local Blacks and Latinos, a group of minority voters filed a federal lawsuit accusing the commissioners of racial gerrymandering, violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Constitution.
The GOP commissioners say they are acting in a partisan nature, which is constitutional, as opposed to racial, which is not. Their goal is to flip a Democratic seat to Republican. Their rationale is that Republican leadership is responsible for Tarrant County’s popularity and prosperity, not Democratic rule, even though annual wages and job growth are better in Democrat-run Texas counties like Dallas, Harris (Houston), and Travis (Austin) than in Tarrant.
An analysis by the UCLA Voting Rights Project reveals the racial bias in the new map, proving “a consistent pattern of racial packing” that silences the voices of Blacks and Latinos, who make up a majority of Tarrant County’s population.
The plaintiffs have added that during his 2022 campaign, O’Hare said: “If you’re a Republican officeholder and you haven’t been called a racist, then you probably haven’t done a thing”
Tarrant County taxpayers will pay for the commissioners’ defense. The legal challenge will not be cheap. The plaintiffs are represented by powerful Texas-based voting rights attorney Chad Dunn.
“Intentional discrimination is still against the law,” he said in a statement. “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.”
The map was drawn by a national GOP operative and a prominent anti-voting law firm in Washington, D.C.
