Originally published in Liberation News.

A lawsuit filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project and Texas
Organizing Project has scored a victory against voter suppression
in Bexar County, Texas — where the county seat is San Antonio —
forcing the county to open an additional 129 voting locations.
Keeping voting locations open is a crucial avenue of struggle in
the fight against voter suppression in the South.

Bexar County’s location closings violated Texas election code

Even by Texas’s extremely voter-unfriendly election code, Bexar
County’s election administration would not have met the bare
minimum requirements.

The Texas Election Code states that the “total number of
countywide polling places may not be less than: … 50 percent of
the number of precinct polling places that would otherwise be
located in the county for that election.” In other words, the
county needs to run one polling place for every two precincts.

Bexar County, which has 776 precincts, needs to have a
minimum of 388 polling places. Instead, the county was
proposing just 267 locations for approximately 1.2 million
registered voters. It was over this shortfall that TCRP and TOP
sued Bexar County Election Administrator Jaque Callanen.
This lawsuit follows a previous lawsuit filed by Texas Civil
Rights Project in 2020 over Bexar County’s violation of legal
framework in determining voting site locations. The county lost
this suit too, and was forced to restore previously closed voting
locations.

According to Joaquin Gonzalez, a lawyer for TCRP, “The
baseline for any election is one polling place for [each] election
precinct.” The addition of 129 voting locations is important, but
still far beyond what civil rights advocates consider the minimum
for electoral fairness.

County decisions part of a broad pattern of voter suppression

Closure of polling locations in heavily Latino cities like San
Antonio is one of several fronts in the right-wing assault on
voting rights.

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the provision of the
Voting Rights Act that required states and localities with a history
of racist voter suppression to demonstrate their compliance with
federal law before making major voting changes.

Just hours after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, then-Texas
Attorney General Greg Abbott announced a voter ID law that was
considered the strictest in the country at the time. North Carolina
also immediately implemented a voter ID law that a federal court
determined was designed to target Black voters “with almost
surgical precision.”

States previously regulated by the VRA immediately began
closing polling places. One thousand six hundred and eighty
eight polling places in these states closed between 2012 and polling places have continued closing despite the South
having the largest growth rate in the country in the past 10 years,
at 10.2 percent.

In 2016, TCRP sued the state on behalf of Texas voters who were
forced to take a separate trip to the Department of Public Safety
office in order to register to vote. This effectively excludes those
who cannot afford to take an entire day off of work to register to
vote and those who renew their driver’s license online. In 2018,
Texas appealed that suit in an attempt to maintain its system of
disenfranchisement.

In 2019, Texas passed Senate Bill 9. This new bill concentrated
more polling sites in whiter neighborhoods with historically
higher voter registration numbers and made it a felony for Texans
to vote if they are ineligible to do so. This not only criminalizes
unsuspecting voters who may not be aware of their voting status,
but it also abandons areas with low voter registration by taking
away polling sites. Since reducing voting sites will decrease
voting participation, this creates a feedback loop that further
suppresses voter turnout.

The Bexar County decision is welcome news that provides a rare
reversal of local voter suppression efforts.

The fight for democracy is still ahead

The recent push by the rightwing in all sectors, and in the voting
rights arena especially, is something that has to be fought tooth
and nail. Texas plays a key role in pushing the far right-wing
agenda across the country, and if Texas is allowed to successfully
disenfranchise Black and Brown voters, other states will follow
suit.

Nonprofit legal advocates have waged important campaigns to
keep voting locations open and help voters clear the obstacles to
registration. But they are limited in what they can offer under the
current system. The Democrats have been largely absent from
this fight, as much of the right-wing assault on democracy has
happened during the Obama and Biden administrations — when
Democrats held the reins of power.

We must continue to fight back against these attacks on our basic
democratic rights and build a mass movement capable not just of
resisting the right-wing assault on democracy, but expanding
democracy even further.