The Tarrant Area Commissioners authorized the brand-new map in a 3 – 2 ballot Tuesday.
TARRANT COUNTY, Texas– Much less than 24 hours after the Tarrant County Commissioners elected to accept a brand-new electoral map that’s readied to enhance the court’s Republican bulk , residents filed a lawsuit, affirming the new map is racially prejudiced.
Tarrant Area Commissioners voted to approve the new map, alternative 7, which develops 3 districts with a Republican majority, in a 3 – 2 ballot along partisan lines Tuesday. The most significant modification in the new map is in Precinct 2, where 52 5 % of voters supported the Autonomous prospect in the 2024 governmental election under the current map. Redistricting generally takes place after the Census every 10 years, but Tarrant Area Commissioners had not redrawn their precinct borders given that 2011
After the vote, on Wednesday, a group of 5 Tarrant Region citizens submitted a federal claim that names Tarrant County, the Tarrant Area Commissioners Court, and Tarrant Area Court Tim O’Hare, alleging the brand-new map is racially inequitable. The suit, filed in the U.S. Area Court in the Northern District of Texas, calls on the court to quit the county from embracing the new map and to call for the region to send future redistricting strategies to the court for review.
“Map 7 surgically relocates minority citizens from Area 2 to District 1 while equally as meticulously relocating Anglo citizens from Area 1 to Area 2 The resulting map– in a county in which most of residents are non-Anglo– has three Anglo-majority precincts and one majority-minority district,” the lawsuit affirms. “Additionally, Map 7 additionally disenfranchises over 150, 000 individuals of voting age in Tarrant County who were next qualified to elect a commissioner candidate in the November 2026 election by moving them from an even-numbered precinct to an odd-numbered district.”
The voters argue in the claim that the new map had not been required by population imbalance.
“This racially discriminatory mid-decade redistricting procedure was not demanded by any population imbalance among the precincts– the overall populace inconsistency was listed below 2 percent– well below 10 percent inconsistency allowable for city government bodies,” the lawsuit specified.
“The strategy was composed and come on a process designed to be inequitable, a minimum of partly to decrease the political power of Black voters and Latino voters by restricting their capability to influence commissioner court political elections to a solitary area out of four when minorities are most of residents in the County and just timid of fifty percent of qualified citizens in Tarrant Region,” the suit concluded.
“This is all the time racial discrimination,” among the complainants, Jay Jackson, informed WFAA Tuesday. “I believed this was important sufficient for me to tip up and be a complainant … the message it’s sending out to residents of shade that our vote doesn’t matter, and our voice does not matter.”
O’Hare and proponents of the redistricting plan, however, say the brand-new map “shows the will of the voters.”
“Tarrant County has consistently elected Republican politicians to judicial seats, state legal placements and other countywide offices,” O’Hare uploaded in a declaration after the ballot. “The Commissioners Court districts will now mirror this political majority.”
In a meeting with WFAA on Tuesday, O’Hare refuted any kind of case that this has to do with racial discrimination.
“Democrats never say anything else other than that,” he said. “So, this is partisan national politics. And right here’s the problem: democrats so usually do not offer genuine options. They just turn to name calling sobs of bigotry,” he claimed. “I truly believe Tarrant Area will certainly be far better off with republican management.”