- Joined
- Dec 1, 2017
- Messages
- 22,847
- Reaction score
- 6,781
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed

Texas Voting Restrictions Take Their Toll: “Sorry — No Democrat Voting”
In Texas and at least 18 other states, restrictive new voting laws spell problems for upcoming runoffs, primaries, and the November general election.
More than 170 election workers in the county dropped out at the last minute, Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Allison Campolo told The Intercept.
The party did not know how many voters had been stopped from voting at the county’s Azle location that day. Across the state, Campolo said, both parties had trouble finding election workers on primary day.
But Tarrant County experienced “an extreme number of last minute drop offs of available election judges.”
According to the Texas Tribune, more than a dozen polling locations in Tarrant County were closed for several hours due to staffing shortages among election judges.
Texas is one of several states — also including Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado — to employ election judges to open and run poll locations, manage poll workers, and settle disputes.
Other states call these officials “poll workers” or “election clerks,” but in Texas, where election judges have been used for decades, they’re partisan, and during primary elections, they are appointed by the chair of the county political party holding the primary.
Numerous states had issues with recruiting poll workers at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the number of jurisdictions that reported difficulty in finding enough poll workers increased by 5 percent between the 2016 and 2018 elections.
But the number of sudden dropouts in Tarrant County this month was unusual, according to Campolo.